Plot and plunder
A surge in land grabbing cases in Telangana’s Karimnagar has underscored a worrying trend of rampant corruption and exploitation as well as systemic lapses, leaving people vulnerable to injustice. Authorities are being called upon to implement reforms and
here is unmistakable joy in Anumandla Ravinder’s voice as he tells his friends and relatives about his longcherished dream finally taking shape on a 140square yard plot: building a house for his family. A resident of Theegalaguttapally, located on the outskirts of Karimnagar city in northern Telangana, about 160 kilometres from Hyderabad, the 49yearold, with his modest stature and demeanour, embodies the quintessential traits of a middleclass family man. With the concrete slab recently laid for the house, his excitement is evident. But his eyes well up as he reflects on the journey that led him here.
Mistaken for tears of joy, they hide his pain as he recalls the solitary battle he fought against a powerful landgrabbing gang led by a local politician. Starting off as a supervisor at a bar nearly three decades ago, he climbed his way up to the position of manager.
With his modest savings, Ravinder, a Dalit, purchased an open plot on the city outskirts in 2014. Over the next couple of years, he constructed a basement on the plot with contributions from his near and dear ones. All seemed well until a phone call in May 2022 shattered his dreams: a neighbour reported unauthorised digging on his plot to lay pillar foundations.
Scared, Ravinder rushed to the site, and saw 15 people led by a leader of the thenruling party trying to erect a structure on his plot. “That was the beginning of my nightmare, and I was compelled to seek police help,” he recalls, fighting back tears.
A police team arrived at the spot and asked the two parties to visit the police station. Ravinder went with the plot documents but the other party represented by one Vijender (name changed), henchman of the local leader, did not turn up.
After hours of waiting, Ravinder returned to the site the next morning, only to find a whitewashed compound wall and two tinshed rooms on his plot. A group of strangers was inside the ‘overnightraised house’ and denied Ravinder entry. “There were more surprises. Three others, armed with forged documents, claimed rights to the plot,” says Ravinder, adding that those people had filed multiple cases against him over the ‘disputed’ land. Police bound him over, cautioning him against entering the plot without a court order.
He says he then approached the thenMinister Gangula Kamalakar, who summoned the local leader and reprimanded him for grabbing the property. Ravinder managed to secure building permission, laid a borewell and raised pillars to build his house, after having installed surveillance cameras.
However, just when he believed things were looking up, he faced another setback about 10 months later. This time, a group of nearly 10 people, wielding big hammers, stormed the site on the night of January 10 this year and went on a rampage, demolishing the pillars.
Ravinder sank into despair until a friend advised him to seek help from the new Police Commissioner of Karimnagar, Abhishek Mohanty. “I went to visit him the very next day. The Commissioner was not present but his staff heard me out and assured to act on my complaint,” he shares.
Within 48 hours, a team led by Assistant Commissioner of Police, Karimnagar, V. Madhavi landed up at the site, conducted inquiries and
Tverified his documents. A week later, the situation took a positive turn as the police registered a criminal case based on Ravinder’s complaint, leading to the arrest of a local politician, Thota Sripathi Rao, and others involved.
Complaints galore
This is not a stray incident. Over the past three months, 22 criminal cases have been filed with Karimnagar police, with many more complaints under investigation. Three corporators of the Karimnagar Municipal Corporation (KMC), spouses of four corporators, a Zilla Parishad Territorial Constituency member, a former Mandal Parishad Territorial Constituency member, and a Mandal Revenue Officer have been arrested and sent to judicial custody for landrelated criminal activities. Even a districtlevel sports body president, a close associate of Kamalakar, was arrested. While a majority of them have been released on bail, a few are still behind bars.
Since 2020, the police have been receiving similar complaints from various parts of the city, particularly from villages surrounding it.
Nearly 13 gram panchayats on the city periphery have been merged with the KMC in recent years. These areas have more open lands. Some villages like Rekurthi here have massive tracts of government lands. With the real estate boom, prices of land skyrocketed. A decade ago, a middleclass family would not have favoured owning a flat, but the culture of apartments has spread to every corner of the city as space shrinks.
An IPS officer of 2011 batch, Mohanty was posted as Karimnagar Police Commissioner in October 2023 ahead of the Telangana State Assembly elections in December. Even while handling election work, he made sure he was accessible to the people. He noticed that a considerable number of complaints were about landgrabbing, chit fund operators and financial disputes. Upon reviewing some cases, the police realised that ensuring justice to the victims would require thorough analysis, ascertaining facts, and identifying legal complexities. To address this, he set up a special team with two ACPs, along with inspectors and subinspectors with a proper track record.
“The Commissioner’s first step was to ascertain authenticity of the complaint. That required calling for records from both parties, studying them and then going for prosecution with the police station concerned,” explains an officer of the special team.
Discrepancies in Dharani
But it was easier said than done. Some cases were extremely complex, making it difficult to identify the culprits and comprehend their modus operandi. For instance, engineering graduate B. Raghu, a resident of Seetharampur in Karimnagar, approached the police, alleging that four gunta of his father’s land had been mutated in the names of his aunts and uncle without his knowledge through the State government’s Dharani portal, an online platform for land records.
“Normally, police would have dismissed it as a civil dispute and asked us to move court. But I insisted on a thorough probe,” Raghu recalls.
Investigators found that the mutation of the land papers was initiated using the login credentials of Village Revenue Assistant Jeevan Goud, an employee of Karimnagar mandal revenue office. Surprisingly, instead of registration documents and encumbrance certificate, details of the income tax returns of Goud’s relative and the curriculum vitae of an unidentified person had been uploaded. How this mutation was approved raised questions about the reliability of the portal.
Approval for mutations on Dharani portal requires the Collector’s digital thumb impressions. Two outsourced employees and a contract technician assist the Collector in this process. It is suspected that these persons may have misled the Collector by referencing unrelated files. Investigators plan to interview the former Collector in this case.
Mandal Revenue Officer (MRO) Chilla Srinivas, who held full additional charge at the revenue office, emerged as the mastermind. Police arrested Chanda Santosh of Ramagundam, a fair price shop dealer, as the property was mutated in his name. He confessed to being a benami for Srinivas, whom he knew from the time the latter served as a Revenue Inspector in Ramagundam.
The MRO initially claimed innocence but when confronted with evidence of his phone conversations with Santosh, he was left speechless. Investigators are still probing possible connections between the outsourced employees assisting the Collector and the MRO.
Srinivas, now suspended and released on bail after being arrested in Raghu’s case, faces another serious charge involving another MRO, Jinka Jayanth. Srinivas was arrested in the first case while serving as Gajwel MRO in Siddipet district, while Jayanth, the complainant in the second case, is MRO of AkbarpetBompally in the same district.
Jayanth owns ancestral land of 11.08 acres under survey no. 94 in Kisannagar of Karimnagar city. One Sunchu Rajaiah also owned 2.32 acres under the same survey number, which he sold to a man named Laxmaiah in 1954 before his death.
A police officer says Srinivas, along with MRO Muzamil Ahmed and Village Revenue Officer Vishnuvardhan Raj, schemed to acquire part of this land.
They prepared virasat (a term used for mutation of land due to death of land owner or on will) orders for 2.32 acres in favour of Rajaiah’s family, intending to use the forged documents to claim Jayanth’s ancestral land in Kisannagar.
Investigators discovered that before issuing the virasat orders, the group registered three plots of 726, 484, and 1,089 square yards in the names of three persons – Srinivas’ motherinlaw, brother of another MRO Ahmed and wife of VRO Vishnuvardhan Raj’s friend, a police officer explains. Karimnagar Three Town police registered a criminal case based on Jayanth’s complaint. While the probe is under way, Jayanth’s sibling has approached the Vigilance and Enforcement (V&E) department for an inquiry.
The department faulted the accused Revenue officials in a report, recommending action against them under the Prevention of Corruption Act. However, action based on the V&E report is yet to be initiated.
Hope on the horizon
Similar to bar manager Ravinder’s case, sexagenarian Kotha Raji Reddy is overjoyed after successfully thwarting multiple attempts over two years to illegally occupy his open plot located near the district collectorate building. A retired welder of Singareni Collieries Company Limited, Reddy’s fight for justice earned him widespread recognition in the city.
In 1999, Reddy had purchased an open plot of 267 square yards in Bhagathnagar. To prevent encroachment, he obtained permission to build a singlestorey house. He built a compound wall and a tworoom house with a tin shed with the house number 83238/ 4/1 in 2006. After retiring in 2020, he rented a tworoom portion near the site to carry out construction. On being asked by authorities to reapply for permission, he did so and was granted approval to construct a house of ground plus two floors.
“I got this second approval on July 27, 2021, and went ahead with the digging to lay pillars. However, a few days later, local corporator Thota Ramulu and another leader Cheeti Rama Rao, along with their henchmen, barged into the house and asked me to stop construction work,” he alleges.
Reddy maintains that the corporator claimed the plot was purchased by Rama Rao but they did not have any valid documents.
He regularly turned up at the weekly Prajavaani, a programme where residents share their grievances directly with the district authorities for redressal. There, he highlighted the attempts to illegally seize his plot using forged documents. When his petitions to the police did not elicit any response, he approached the High Court, which ordered a survey and inspection of the plot. Notices were issued to him and the other individual claiming rights to the land.
The survey report that came out at the end of 2022 went in his favour. “I thought with the report through the High Court order, no one could stop the construction of my house,” Reddy recalls. However, throughout 2023, his opponents hindered construction by deploying municipal staff and police. Seeking relief, he attended the Praja Darbar organised by the new Congress government on December 8, 2023, where he detailed his ordeal.
After receiving an application ID, he met the Karimnagar Police Commissioner in the second week of January. “The next day, a team of police officials visited my house site,” Reddy recalls. After thorough verification of documents, they permitted him to proceed with construction as he had all papers in place.
People who have gone through prolonged ordeals and fought legal battles, are now a relieved lot. Yet, their experiences raise questions about how the same police officers who initially couldn’t assist them turned saviours. A police officer, requesting anonymity, says an inquiry was initiated against four officers who allegedly failed to follow procedure and exhibited bias.
“Police officers failing to thoroughly examine a complaint by branding it a civil dispute is detrimental to the interests of lawabiding citizens,” says HC advocate Uma Shankar.
In May 2022, a neighbour informed me about some digging work on my plot. When I rushed to the site, I saw 15 people led by a leader of the then ruling party trying to erect a structure on my land. That was the beginning of my nightmare. ANUMANDLA RAVINDER,
Bar manager
Police officers failing to thoroughly examine a complaint by branding it a civil dispute is detrimental to the interests of lawabiding citizens.
High Court advocate