The Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau (VACB) has spotlighted how government regulators bend the law to aid the real estate mafia raze hills and use the excavated earth to reclaim ecologically fragile wetlands for construction.
In a Statewide surprise inspection codenamed ‘Operation Save Earth’ on Tuesday, anti-corruption investigators raided several excavation sites across the State to target destructive laterite mining that had spawned a powerful mafia responsible for scores of violent crimes, including a murder at Kattakada near here recently.
The activities of the mafia, a potent amalgam of corrupt law enforcers, ruling front politicians, owners of trucks and earth movers, mobsters and real estate developers, posed a threat to environmental activists and imperilled the safety of citizens who lived in natural disaster-prone regions.
Investigators found that the land mafia routinely exploited the provisions in the law that enabled citizens to excavate a limited amount of earth for construction purposes. They used thugs to muscle people into selling their land and used the names of their victims to get permission from the Mining and Geology Department to excavate and remove earth from the plot.
The VACB found that geology officials, possibly for hefty bribes, sanctioned the applications for excavating earth without visiting the site, verifying the genuineness of the applicant, or specifying the quantum of the laterite to be removed.
The officials also issued ‘mineral transit’ passes to the mafia who used the permits with free abandon to transport the excavated earth on dumper trucks to wetland sites they sought to convert into housing plots.
The mafia acquired wetlands by recruiting landless persons to buy less than five cents of paddy land at their behest.
The purchaser then made an application in the local village office for permission to reclaim the wetland for building a house.
The land mafia used the method to acquire large swathes of environmentally fragile paddy and wetland incrementally for sale as housing plots.
The police and Revenue officials, who reportedly made a fortune in monthly bribes from the real estate mafia, generally turned a blind eye to the violations.
The Vigilance seized several dumper trucks, earthmovers and allied equipment during the raids. DG, VACB, Anil Kanth, and IG, H. Venkatesh, supervised the operation.
