Hyderabad: The Anti-Corruption Bureau has shown a major shift in its approach towards corrupt officials, following the Miyapur land scam.
The ACB, which usually lays a trap for corrupt officials or takes action on disproportionate assets cases based on information and investigation, is, for the first time, involved in nailing accused officials linked to a scam that is being investigated by agencies like the Crime Investigation Department and the local police. The ACB has booked three officials of the registration department who were involved in the Miyapur and other land scams and unearthed huge assets.
ACB Director General J. Purnachandar Rao has formed a special cell that he is directly supervising to handle the stamps and the registration department. The cell led by DSP D. Sunita, has been cracking the whip against corrupt officials of the stamps and registration department.
The cell has been receiving several complaints regarding stamp duty evasion, double registration, collusion of sub-registrars with sellers and buyers of property, and registration of land in the prohibited list.
The ACB is also working on a report on corruption in the department and will soon submit recommendations to Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
The ACB on Thursday conducted searches and unearthed '4 crore worth of disproportionate assets of Medchal sub-registrar T. Ramesh Chandra Reddy.
An official of ACB said, “CID and local police probing land scams will connect the crime proceeds to their assets. We will be focusing on how these officials linked to land cases have amassed disproportionate assets to their known sources of income.”
The ACB would suggesting to the government that the rank of the official registering the property should change depending on the value. Currently, all properties are registered by sub-registrars.
The ignorance of the public and its dependence on document writers is also said to be one of the reasons for the registration frauds.
“The centralised database of prohibited lands is not updated sometimes. The revenue department has also failed to produce up-to-date data to the registration department in some cases,” said an official of the stamps and registration department.
“The lack of sub-division of lands is also an important reason. In many cases, sub-division is not happening, due to which confusion takes place. Sometimes there are parcels of government and private land in the same survey number,” he said.
