Allahabad HC dismisses Shobhan Sarkar’s petition for digging gold in Fatehpur

The Allahabad High Court on Wednesday dismissed the petition of seer Shobhan Sarkar, who had sought directions to the Uttar Pradesh government and the district administration of Fatehpur for allowing excavations in a village where, he believed, huge reserves of gold lay buried. A Division Bench comprising Justices Ashok Bhushan and Vipin Sinha dismissed the petition of Sarkar with the remark "no case has been made out to grant any of the reliefs as claimed in the writ petition". Sarkar had claimed that there was a "hidden gold treasure of about 2,500 tonnes at the bank of river Ganga in village Adampur, Tehsil and District Fatehpur". He had also claimed that he was ready to bear the expenses for carrying out excavations at the site for which he had planned to involve experts from Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad and IIT-Kanpur. However, the court rejected the petition observing that Sarkar had "miserably failed to prove any of his right to claim any permission". Significantly, an excavation was carried out at a village in Unnao district recently following a similar claim made by Sarkar. The seer later on blamed the failure of the operation on his not being "invited" to the site by the excavators.