Soon after winning the assembly elections with huge majority, YSR Congress party president Y S Jaganmohan Reddy declared that the construction of new capital city Amaravati by the previous Chandrababu Naidu government smacked of a huge scam and he would get the scam investigated into very shortly.
Within no time, officials started digging into the land scam in Amaravati, particularly in the so-called “revolutionary” land pooling scheme.
While digging into the files, they discovered an interesting case of land scam, allegedly indulged in by a journalist working for a popular television channel.
Under the land pooling scheme, thousands of farmers gave away their lands for the capital construction, in lieu of which each farmer was allotted residential and commercial plots in the capital region, besides cash payment of Rs 30,000 to Rs 50,000 per acre on annuity basis towards compensation of crop loss.
Records show that this particular journalist had given away 40 acres of land and got the plots, residential and commercial, worth crores of rupees registered in his name, besides annuity payments.
In the normal circumstances, this is quite a remarkable sacrifice by a journalist and being a publicity-crazy person, Naidu would have definitely gained a lot of publicity for this. But, everything was done in a hush-hush manner.
Now, the officials have discovered that this donation of 40 acres was a big scam.
The journalist actually had just two acres of land and he conveniently occupied 38 acres of assigned land adjacent to it with the “cooperation” of local officials and politicians.
He got the land transferred in his name and that of his relatives silently and finally “donated” the entire land to the capital. Even a former minister allegedly had a hand in the entire scam.
Apparently, this journalist maintains a very high profile and used to care a damn for even top officials, forget the fellow journalists.
“He doesn’t even reciprocate the wishes of other journalists and considers himself to be too big a man because of his political connections. Now, he will get definitely get exposed very soon,” a source in the YSRC said.
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