Hyderabad: The Telangana high court on Tuesday (March 12) directed the petitioners in a writ petition relating to huge alleged land scam to take out personal notices to the respondents, including official respondents. During the recently concluded assembly elections, The Wire had reported on allegations of a land scam in the making under the aegis of the Dharani Act, the controversial land records management system devised by the erstwhile Bharat Rashtra Samithi regime.
In the writ petition, petitioners highlighted the 40-years saga of alleged cheating and creating fraudulent sale transactions amounting to about Rs 25,000-crore scam on the outskirts of the capital city, Hyderabad. The contention of the petitioners is that they purchased the plots between 1983 and 1986 from the then pattedars through their authorised general power of attorney. However, concealing this fact, the pattedars obtained ‘patta passbooks’ (land title deeds) usually issued by the state government to the farmers/land owners. Since then, the erstwhile land owners created close to 1,000 sham sale deeds in spite of repeated directions from various courts and revenue departments.
The plot owners’ association also filed a petition to the then Ranga Reddy district revenue court requesting it to cancel the illegally issued pattadar passbooks. After the enquiry and hearing, the joint collector’s court categorically asked the revenue authorities to cancel the pattadar passbooks as the said land in question was converted into plots and sold to more than 3,000 people. But it turned out that the revenue authorities paid scant respect to the joint collector’s court order.
After the state government brought the Dharani Act, the petitioners filed a writ petition seeking the high court’s intervention asking revenue authorities to exclude certain survey numbers of Vattinagulapally village of Ranga Reddy district from the Dharani portal to restrict the further creation of fraudulent transactions. The high court restrained the revenue authorities from entertaining any sale transactions. Despite this, the revenue authorities allegedly registered close to 200 sale deeds between July 2022 and March 2023.
In July 2023, the high court bench headed by Justice C.V. Bhaskar Reddy directed the Commissioner of Police, Cyberabad and other officials not to take any action on plot owners. But despite high court directions, police officials from Ganchibowli Police Station were obstructing the plot owners from entering their plots. They are also alleged to have taken away land survey equipment.
The petitioners, as an unusual method of protest, filed nominations against KCR in the recently concluded assembly elections to draw the attention of the government to their plight. KCR is said to have directed his lieutenant Harish Rao to convince the plot owners to withdraw nominations. After assurances given by Hari Rao, the petitioners withdrew their nominations.
Since then, as there is no change on the ground, hundreds of plot owners have submitted a representation to the Director General of Police, Telangana to take action against the ‘land mafia’.
The Crime Investigation Department was entrusted with the job of enquiry and preparing a dossier on the issue. The petitioners drew the attention of the high court to the CID report and pleaded for it to direct the police department to register criminal cases and conduct an enquiry by appointing a Special Investigating Team.
The high court on Tuesday directed the state government to respond to the allegations. The case is set to be heard on April 15. Advocates Nallamasu Krishna and Veeraiah Konduri represented the petitioners.
