Hyderabad: The HMDA has discovered that land maps of 80 villages are missing and 70 others had maps which did not carry survey numbers. This was a result of corruption among village revenue officers (VROs).
The patwari system was abolished by the NTR government in 1985 and replaced by village assistants, village administrative officers, panchayat secretaries and village revenue officers. HMDA officials said these officials did not maintain land records.
According to highly- placed sources in HMDA, officials superimposed satellite images on the integrated master plan and found 9,000 errors pertaining to water bodies. As many as 300 water bodies were not marked on the master plan.
Officials embarked on an exercise to rectify errors and in the process found that besides water bodies the HMDA did not have the survey numbers for land in 150 villages. The maps of about 80 villages were found to be missing when authorities tried to demarcate survey numbers.
Sources said that ground-level staff in nexus with local leaders had destroyed the records, which allowed the sale of land with fraudulent survey numbers and fake documents.
Apart from huge corruption, this led to the delay in implementation of integrated master plan.
With the help of Central Suvey Office, the HMDA has procured maps dating back to 80 years to identify the missing villages with appropriate survey numbers.
A senior HMDA official on condition of anonymity said that HMDA commissioner B. Janardhan Reddy along with town planning officials had verified maps procured from Central Survey Office and fixed boundaries of 40 villages and rectified 35,000 survey numbers.
He said the HMDA would fix boundaries for all 150 villages by January and rectify the survey numbers to submit the rectified master plan.
“With the help of maps procured from Central Suvey Office, the HMDA could resolve 80 per cent of the issues and rest has to be rectified on the ground which might give a scope for irregularities. HMDA is planning to have a mechanism to avoid such irregularities the details of which would announced soon,” the official added.
