‘Land grabbing’ during BRS regime runs into thousands of crores: Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy  

Minister Reddy exposes massive land grabbing scandal by BRS government, vows to restore transparency in land transactions.

Revenue and Housing Minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy said the scale of ‘land grabbing’ during the BRS government using G.O. 59 was found to be more than 2,000 acres in the three districts bordering Hyderabad and it could be much more if the details of the ongoing investigation in Telangana come out.

In an interview with The Hindu on Friday, he said the encroached lands were spread across Hyderabad and the bordering districts Rangareddy, Medchal-Malkajgiri and Sangareddy, and they were all owned by Revenue, Endowments, Wakf and Forest departments. The total land cost will run into a few thousands of crores, he alleged.

Mr. Reddy said that the properties were illegally transferred to near and dear ones of the BRS leaders through the GO 59, which was primarily aimed at regularising government lands. The BRS government misused a facility to attach small pieces of government lands beside private lands to private owners ready to pay the market price.

He claimed that the investigations revealed the misuse to the tune of 380 acres in Siddipet and 8.5 acres in the Raidurg area where the land cost is between ₹80 crore to ₹100 crore per acre. In Raidurg, government land was divided into 999-square-yard plots and illegally transferred to private individuals.

“In a similar mode, huge parcels of land were transferred to private individuals and companies with the confidence that BRS would come back to power and the transactions would get the legal stamp. The government will expose all such transactions and put them before the public for scrutiny. The idea now is to scrutinise land records from 2014 when Telangana was formed to identify such fraudulent transfer and recover the same,” he added.

Accusing the BRS of destroying the revenue system with the sole aim of ‘grabbing’ lands, he said the 2018 Revenue Act and the Dharani portal in 2020 facilitated illegal transactions by removing the ‘prohibited list’ of government properties.

The idea of removing 39 columns from the manual land records and bringing it to just one column by the BRS government was to abolish the system of tracing the land origins or the transaction history. The new Revenue Act to be introduced in the next Assembly session will have 14 to 16 columns to restore the land records and streamline the mutation process apart from introducing revenue tribunals.