HYDERABAD: A technical error in the integrated land revenue management system — the Bhu Bharati portal, formerly known as the Dharani portal — allowed middlemen to generate challans for as little as Rs 1 for land-related services such as registrations, while pocketing thousands of rupees and depriving the government of significant revenue.
According to official sources, middlemen generated challans for nominal amounts — in some instances as low as Rs 1 — for land registration transactions. While some registrations were processed for amounts as low as Rs 50, officials believe the Rs 1 challans were generated to test the system’s tolerance and exploit its vulnerabilities. Officials said the miscreants exploited the ‘Edit’ option to manipulate the amounts credited to government accounts. Intermediaries first generated challans reflecting the correct stamp duty, showed them to the buyers, and collected the full amount.
“In the final stage of remittance to the government’s accounts, the middlemen deleted the first or last digits of the challan figures to drastically reduce the amount — possibly to less than 10% of the total payable — resulting in a substantial loss to the state exchequer,” an official said.
64 lakh transactions, Rs 8K crore fraud
A senior IAS officer said the fraudsters used the NRI option and convinced ordinary parties to proceed with transactions by claiming they had funds in their accounts that needed to be utilised urgently.
“The fraud occurred in several districts, including Rangareddy, Nalgonda, Khammam, and Warangal,” he said, adding that more districts could be part of the scam. He also said the technical issue has now been fixed to prevent such fraudulent transactions.
With over 64 lakh transactions generating revenue of more than `8,000 crore, it is a challenging task for investigating officials to identify illegal transactions, let alone recover the lost amounts.
As authorities detected that the discrepancies emerged in the crediting of challans soon after the rollout of the Dharani portal, revenue experts pointed out that the lapses occurred due to a lack of supervision.
Speaking to TNIE, Vuppala Balaraju, a retired MRO, said the audit process should have identified such discrepancies. “However, since 2016, when MROs were designated as joint sub-registrars, there has been no audit in the state,” he said. He added that the role of MROs was limited to examining whether the parties to a transaction were legally valid, noting that challan payments were not under their purview.