As land prices spike in Telangana, so do bribe amounts

HYDERABAD: Keesara tehsildar EB Nagaraju on Friday night was caught by ACB sleuths taking a bribe of Rs 1.10 crore. The bribe was offered in connection with a land in Rampally Dayara in Keesara mandal in favour of some persons and a real estate agency.
ACB officials said two businessmen offered the bribe to the tehsildar to issue the proceedings of the land and start developing it. Medchal-Malkajgiri district officials said an acre of land now costs Rs 20 crore and this could be the reason the businessmen offered him Rs 1.10 crore to settle the row over 28 acres.
This was only the tip of the iceberg of land litigations. Sources said skyrocketing land prices in Hyderabad and surrounding areas have become a major source of cash flow to some of the revenue employees. At least half a dozen major cases reported in the city and surrounding areas in the last one year have revenue officials caught in the web of bribery and land litigations.
A senior revenue official pointed out more complaints had started coming after the government initiated the land records updation programme (LRUP) in 2016 and Rythu Bandhu scheme. Due to high land rates, there is competition among the officers to bag plum postings like tehsildar in Rangareddy and Medchal districts. A majority of them get postings with the purported blessings of politicians, sources said.
A case in point: Nagaraju, who began his career as a junior assistant in the revenue department, continued to function in RR district despite rising through the ranks and expanded his network of operations.
“The entire department (revenue) is getting a bad name following the actions of a handful of officers, especially those working in Hyderabad and erstwhile RR districts. We have represented to the state several times to transfer field-level officers in the erstwhile RR district. But, our pleas have fallen on deaf ears,” Vanga Ravinder Reddy, president of Telangana Revenue Employees’ Services Association (TRESA), told STOI.
Interestingly, there was no let-up in the bribery cases involving revenue officers even after CM K Chandrasekhar Rao made no bones about the growing corruption in the department. “The fact that the department is being revamped, including a merger with the panchayat raj department shows the government’s seriousness in putting an end to corruption,” an official said.
Last year, ACB had come out with a list of ‘most corrupt’ departments based on the number of cases registered. The revenue department had the dubious distinction of topping the charts, followed by the municipal administration and home (police) department.