Amaravati: The farmers, who had given away their lands under the land pooling scheme for building the new capital city of Amaravati, were eagerly waiting for news, from the Centre, on the exemption of 'capital gains tax' on the first sale of their lands.
Instead of providing some relief, Prime Minister Narendra Modi dropped a bomb on the farmers by demonetising currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations.
Now scores of farmers, who had literally been building castles in the air for the last couple of years seeing their land prices surge to astronomical heights, suddenly feel doomed. In all, farmers of 29 villages in Amaravati region parted with about 33,400 acres for the capital.
Most of the farmers, however, sold away their land after the price per acre shot up to '2 crore. Between December 9, 2014--when the land pooling scheme was announced --and March 5, 2016, as many as 9,304 transactions were registered wherein 6,573 acres of land was sold.
Of this total, 100 persons purchased 365.66 acres, with 7.5 acres being the single largest transaction and two acres the lowest.
From a minimum of Rs 1 crore, the land price ranged up to a maximum of '2.4 crore an acre. However, the book value (government-fixed registration value) remained somewhere between Rs 8 lakh and Rs 12 lakh per acre and all transactions were based on this only. Thus, in all these transactions hundreds of crores of rupees, if not a few thousand crores, remained "unaccounted for", in official terms, and "black money" in general parlance.
Land transactions came to a halt after March for various reasons, including lack of progress on capital construction, but began again on a low scale in the last 2 months after the temporary Secretariat started functioning at Velagapudi and government launching road development works.
Some of the farmers who sold their land re-built their houses, purchased cars but it was also retained the form of cash either stashed at home or in lockers. There was no other avenue for farmers to preserve their money as it was unaccounted for and kept at home in many a case. Ironically, they can't even show it as income from agriculture as all cropping activity in the capital region was stalled in the last three seasons.
"The PACS used to be liberal in accepting cash deposits in lockers without any limit. But, in the last one month even the PACS stopped accepting large cash deposits," a villager in Mandadam claimed. Ironically, even the money in lockers would be of no use now since high denomination notes have been scrapped.
