1,500-square yard plot for Rs 2L!

Hyderabad: A 1,500-square yard plot in upmarket Jubilee Hills which would cost at least Rs 50 crore was sold for just Rs 1.91 lakh and registered in the name of a person who allegedly impersonated a non-resident Indian.

Claiming that the sale concluded by the previous managing committee of the Jubilee Hills Cooperative Housing Society was fraudulent, B. Ravindranath, the newly-elected president of the society, has approached the Telangana High Court and sought a direction to the police to register a case against his predecessors.

Ravindranath, in the affidavit filed in the High Court, said that the Hyderabad police commissioner, the deputy commissioner of police, Central Crime Station, and the station house officer of Jubilee Hills police, had been ignoring the detailed complaint that he had lodged along with evidence and failed to register a first information report under pressure “from very top functionaries of the state.”

According to his complaint, a copy of which is available with this newspaper, the society allotted Plot 853F to one B. Sirisha in 1988. Three years later, the same was transferred to one Ch Sirisha, who is now a citizen of the United States. The registration could not be completed at that time as she was a minor.

Almost three decades later, T. Narendra Chowdary, former president of the society, and secretary T. Hanumantha Rao registered the plot to Sirisha just a few days after the nationwide lockdown was lifted on June 1 last year. Chowdary allegedly paid the requisite registration fee of Rs 45 lakh.

The registration was concluded in a private house in the name of Sirisha who produced just a voter ID as proof of identity and the registering authority, for reasons best known to him, did not insist on the Aadhaar card.

The complainant alleged that the photograph of Sirisha is different from the photo in the voter ID and there were a lot of variations in the signatures of the purchaser. It is a clear case of impersonation as the original Sirisha did not come to India, he claimed.

The phone number of Sirisha shown in the registration fee challan belongs to a document writer, he alleged. Making matter more serious, the owner of Plot 1,278, Road 63A of Jubilee Hills, which was shown as Sirisha’s address in the voter ID card, lodged a complaint with the police stating that he had owned the place for more than 25 years and no one named Sirisha had ever resided there.

Within days of registering the property in her name, the so-called Sirisha executed a gift deed in the name of a person called Srihari who the complainant alleged was a ‘benami’. Society president Ravindranath demanded that it should be probed if both were eligible to conclude a gift deed as per the income-tax laws.