Telangana

 TELANGANA

With no scrutiny, corrupt Sub-Registrars had their way

Marri Ramu

HYDERABAD, JUNE 04, 2017 00:00 IST

As there is no system in place for superiors to review the registrations done by them , facilitating fraudulent land deals became easy

Can a Sub-Registrar register five entire villages on someone’s name and yet his or her bosses in the Registration and Stamps Department be unaware of it?

An affirmative answer to this question explains how seeds were sown for the two biggest land scams of Miyapur and Balapur in the three-year-old history of Telangana State. The Sub-Registrar, who is in-charge of registration of specific area (described as sub-district) in the district, is the key position in the department. On the face of it, all transactions in the department were computerised. But the absence of a system to review the work executed by Sub-Registrars by their superiors (immediate boss is District Registrar) makes them all the powerful and immune from scrutiny.

For example, a SR registers sale of a building in Abids and the details are recorded in the office computer. “The software we use doesn’t send any message or alert to the DR or other higher-ups about the registration of the property,” a top official unwilling to be named said.

In other government wings like in the police department, the moment a First Information Report (FIR-which means registration of a case) is issued, all the officers in the department can access it and will get a copy of it in their intra-network. Some of them can be even accessed by the general public. “When the SR finalises a registration, none of the seniors can know about it and that created scope for the scam,” an investigator said.

The only way the DR can find out about such transactions is to specifically seek details of a registration and get the papers. “In a city like Hyderabad where real estate boom is on, the number of registrations would be too high each day and reviewing each registration on day-to-day basis is practically not feasible,” says an official.

Using this loophole in the department, the masterminds of the land scams got the registrations carried out as they wished. In Balanagar land scam, the registered document states that one person had sold five entire villages to another. It sounds ridiculous but the SR apparently went ahead with it since chances of superiors questioning the registration were nil. The two scams are a wake-up call to start corrective measures.