HYDERABAD: The proposal to build the city office of the TRS in the upmarket Banjara Hills area has run into rough weather with several plot owners of the Women’s Cooperative Society alleging violation of a Supreme Court status quo order by officials to accommodate the ruling party’s interests.
The TRS has started levelling works on the land even as a public interest litigation challenging the largesse extended by the state government to the ruling party is pending with the High Court. The TRS got one acre of land in Banjara Hills for Rs 5 lakh against the market value of nearly Rs 100 crore.
Earlier, following a dispute among the plot owners in the layout, the apex court had directed all the parties to maintain status quo “until further orders” on about three acres in Survey No. 129/30 near Road No. 12 of Banjara Hills.
According to the plot owners, the revenue authorities went ahead and allotted one acre to the TRS, ignoring their long pending request to demarcate the boundaries between the government land and three-acre private patta land.
“Women’s Cooperative Housing Society even obtained a tentative layout in File no 25/layout/8/70 from the municipal corporation decades ago and executed sale deeds in favour of the plot holders,” said Anjani Aiyagari, legal representative of Kishore Bhujanga Rao, who owned 4,000 sq yds in the same survey number.
Another land owner, E. Shankaramma, sold half her land to the society and retained the remaining 2,000 sq yds. Anjani Aiyagari dashed off a letter to Hyderabad collector to demarcate the land before allowing the TRS to go ahead with the construction.
When contacted, a senior district revenue official told Deccan Chronicle that the land allotted to the TRS belonged to the government and that there was no litigation particularly on the one-acre site.
“After the town survey (TSLR) in 1970s the extent of patta land was found to be around one-and-a-half acres while the remaining land belonged to the government out of which one acre was allotted to the TRS,” he said.
However, the plot owners maintain that TSLR cannot be regarded as the sole guiding factor, quoting the ‘Hyderabad Potteries Pvt Ltd v Collector, Hyderabad district’ case wherein the collector took a stand that land claimed by the private parties was recorded as government land in the TSLR.
Maintaining that the main objective of the town survey was to fix boundaries, the High Court observed that there is no presumption that every entry made in the TSLR shall be presumed to be true. There was no provision in the Act intending to make any detailed enquiries with regard to right, title and interest of persons in the lands.
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