For 40 years, 2,900 plot owners in Telangana fight to reclaim their land

Hyderabad: For a couple of decades, thousands of plot owners have been fighting for the land that they had purchased but the authorities have turned a blind eye even as powerful land grabbers attempt to usurp the property in Keesara mandal.

More than 2,900 plot owners in Anand Nagar Colony Society in Keesara mandal, including retired bureaucrats, bank employees and officers, are at risk of losing the life savings that they spent to own a piece of land.

According to sources, some powerful people sold their land twice and the HMDA issued building permits on the second sale. The owners claimed that patta holders first sold the land divided as plots to more than 1,500 people under a gram panchayat-approved layout between 1981 and 1990.

Through misrepresentation, the landowners allegedly fraudulently obtained new pattadar passbooks and title deeds from the mandal revenue office in 1998. Then they resold the land as agricultural land to a new set of buyers.

The original owners went to court and received a favourable decree (OS 932/2001) in 2007, but the second purchasers continued to occupy the lands, said the members of Anandnagar Colony Society

Recalling the case, society plot owners said that land measuring 245 acres, classified as patta as per the pahani of 1971-72, in Survey No.s 368 to 395 of Keesara village, Medchal-Malkajgiri district, stood in the names of Raghi Venkat Reddy, Raghi Pratap Reddy, Malla Reddy, Sudhakar Reddy, Devender Reddy, Rajeshwar Reddy (brothers of the Raghi family).

The Raghi family obtained layout plan permission (2/68) from the gram panchayat of Keesara, divided the land into plots and sold them beginning in 1981.

The Raghi family members executed general power of attorney (No. 49/1982, and No. 731/VI/1982), and sold over 1,500 plots in Anandnagar Colony between 1981 and 1990 to individuals who were employees at the time. The majority of the plots were registered at the Medchal sub-registrar office.

Despite the fact that large parcels of land were divided into plots and sold, they were not recorded in the 'possession column' as plots in revenue records. Further, pattadar names continued to reflect in the pahanis.

Taking advantage of the situation, the Raghi family members filed affidavits for mutual acceptance/consent with the former MRO, Keesara mandal, in 1998, and requested the issuance of new passbooks and title deeds in accordance with the Record of Rights Act.

The then Keesara MRO distributed individual shares to eligible family members and issued pattadar passbooks and title deeds.

The society plot owners stated that the Raghi family members sold their allocated eligible shares to third parties via registered sale deeds, who in turn obtained individual mutation orders, passbooks and title records beginning in 2001 in accordance with the RoR Act.

In January 2017, the Keesara MRO submitted his report to the collector, establishing that members of the society had purchased the plots from the Raghi family members in 1982.

"Based on the documents obtained through RTI from HMDA, we have submitted a petition to the HMDA commissioner to bring to his attention the egregious misdeeds of HMDA officials,” plot owners told Deccan Chronicle.

“According to RTI documents, the joint collector of the RR district issued a no objection certificate without delving into the merits of the case. HMDA obtained a 'legal opinion' to assist the layout seekers, which ignored many material facts and relied solely on a forged 'Objection Withdrawal Letter from Society's Lawyer’,” the plot owners claimed.

They further claimed that the HMDA had ignored the existence of civil cases pending in the courts and had granted a layout sanction on a disputed site.