The Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau (VACB) on Friday appeared to have made some headway in its investigation into the forgery of revenue documents to illegally aid the conversion of a piece of wetland in Kochi to saleable real estate with the detention of the alleged intermediary in the fraudulent deal.
Investigators said the middleman had, for a sizeable commission, procured the fake government orders that the owner of the 25 cent plot had submitted to the village officer, Choonikkara, to justify his attempt to reclaim the paddy. They said they had persuasive evidence that persons with access to the Land Revenue Commissioner’s office in Thiruvananthapuram were part of the illegal bargain. Investigators inspected the Revenue Divisional Office (RDO) in Ernakulam as part of their probe.
Officers said the forgery of an order signed by the Land Revenue Commissioner (LRC) and also that of the local RDO did not, on the face of it, appear to be a one-off crime.
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They raised the possibility of an inside job. The seals embossed on the documents in question appeared to bear the hallmark of original Revenue Department stamps. The stamp on the LRC's order closely mimicked his original seal.
The language on the suspect order was characteristic of Revenue Department officials. Investigators said the sheer "audacity" of the plot to use fake documents to alter land use pattern to the advantage of the land mafia pointed to a well-entrenched racket. The VACB planned to interview officers at the LRC and collect samples of seals and other authentication devices used by them.
The local village officer's refusal to accept the fake documents as genuine had blown the lid off what VACB officials said could be a State-wide racket that supplied forged government orders and land records to the land mafia to convert wetlands and paddy fields to prime real estate in major urban centres.
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The possibility of similar copy-cat violations of the Kerala Conservation of Paddy Land and Wetland Act, 2008, had prompted Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan to order the anti-corruption inquiry.