A well-educated woman retired from a Kendriya Vidyalaya (Central School),  Bhubaneswar, is running from pillar to post to get justice when her in-laws deprived her of rights to ancestral property in Burla area.

The most unfortunate part for her is that her engineer husband died untimely and in-laws took it as an advantage to swindle her of properties that she is entitled to get as her share.

At the same time, the in-laws are not allowing her to enter the home that her husband constructed on a land purchased by him near her ancestral property. “After my marriage, we stayed in the new  home in Burla for pretty long years. My husband constructed a house over the purchased land with loans from different sources. But thereafter I got an appointment in KV Sambalpur.

That time my husband was working in Hindalco Hirakud in a senior post. Hence, we left Burla and stayed at Hirakud to suit our workplaces,” says Dipti Rekha Mishra.

“But a few years after my husband died untimely and I got transferred to KV Bhubaneswar, my in-laws took it as an opportunity and occupied our home and land. They are not allowing me and my two daughters to enter my home.

Even they don’t give any share of my husband’s parental properties,” says Mishra with a heavy heart.   Mishra further alleges that her in-laws have sold away 32 decimal of her husband’s land with forged documents. "I have informed the matter to the local administration including Collector of Sambalpur, the district SP and the Burla police time and again.

 Everybody is sympathetic to my problem. But I see no suitable action from anybody," says Mishra.

"I also met Tara Dutt at Bhubaneswar when he was the Revenue Secretary and he forwarded all my applications to Sambalpur. But here no one is helping me. Some of the police officers are rather saying that it is a civil case and they are undone.

But is it a fact that driving away a lady from her home applying force  and threatening her of dire consequence is a civil case," she asks.  “I am afraid that my in-laws may even kill me as they have got man and money power and the local administration is sympathetic to them,” says Mishra with request to all competent authorities to give her justice as her case is purely criminal in nature rather than a civil one as told by police. 

When police in Bhubaneswar are arresting builders and property dealers for fraudulent practices, why the same rule is not applicable to my in-laws in Sambalpur  who have sold my husband’s land with forged papers, Mishra asks.