Fake passbooks are not new, but the scale of the scam is

The fake pattadar passbook scam, although a new find for the police, isn’t something the revenue authorities haven't known for some time now.

Speaking to The Hindu, a very high ranking banker from Anantapur district said banks raised the issue of fraudulent title deeds in their meetings with officials in the district. “We asked them to take up the issue of fake passbooks that were being presented to us by various people for loans and asked them (revenue authorities) to book cases against such people,” said

the banker, speaking on condition of anonymity.

While the revenue authorities indeed noted the matter, the then joint collector Anita Ramachandran initiated a process of clearly enumerating and identifying the exact land holdings in the district.

The exercise threw up surprising details. For one thing, it was noted that the total area of the district had ‘increased’ by several thousand hectares thanks to fake pattadar passbooks.

Mrs Ramachandran then started the process of issuing e-pattadar passbooks to all rightful title holders. However, in the last three years, less than 10 percent of the total pattadar passbooks in the district were convereted into e-pattadar pass books. This facilitated the current scam.

“Fake passbooks used to be furnished to avail bank loans, input subsidy, crop insurance, etc earlier too. The same situation continues now except that the promise of a complete loan waiver has fuelled the scale of the scam,” said a senior revenue official.

Meanwhile, the current investigation of the scam by the police and revenue authorities has yielded information that is astonishing to revenue officials themselves.