Harish Rao demands Assembly debate on sale of prime lands at throwaway rates

HYDERABAD

The Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) has alleged that the Congress Government was conspiring to dispose of valuable land chunks of 9,300 acres in the industrial estates at throwaway prices and agreements were done for the lands already.

Addressing a press conference here on Saturday, former minister T. Harish Rao said the Hyderabad Industrial Land Transformation Policy (HILTP) was indeed a land looting policy aimed at transforming the fortunes of those close to Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy, as the government was heavily subsidising the land sale to its “near and dear” ones.

Ridiculing the argument of Minister for Industries and IT D. Sridhar Babu that the government was merely following the GO (policy) brought in by the previous BRS government, Mr. Harish Rao said the BRS government had disposed of some chunks of industrial lands for dual use – 50% each for IT/employment generation and residential/other – with the price fixed at 200% of the SRO (sub-registrar office/registration) value.

However, the Congress government was planning to give away the lands at only 30% of the SRO value for multi-purpose use without any condition for employment generation. Further, they had also decided to waive the HMDA Non-Agricultural Land Assessment (NALA) and Conversion of Land Use (CLU) fee, which would otherwise bring in another ₹13,500 crore to the exchequer for multi-purpose use.

Quoting Mr. Sridhar Babu’s statement that the land sale would get only up to ₹5,000 crore revenue to the government, Mr. Harish Rao sought to know how the government could dispose of lands valued at around ₹4 lakh crore to ₹5 lakh crore to such a meagre value.

He saw a conspiracy as agreements for the lands to be disposed off were already signed much before operationalising the policy (HILTP). He demanded that the government convene the Assembly session to discuss the issue.