Two more held in duplicate land passbook case

Gadwal: The Gadwal police have arrested two more persons in connection with the duplicate land passbooks case and seized 120 duplicate passbooks from their possession on Thursday. Based on the information given by the prime accused Jangam Karunakar, the police with the help of revenue officials arrested Gudusahab and Gopal Rao and seized 120 duplicate passbooks from them.

On further investigation, it was revealed that both Gudusahab and Gopal Rao worked for Jangam Karunakar, a former MPTC. As Gudusahab had the experience of working as a field assistant in NREGA and had also served as a helper for VROs and VRAs in the mandal revenue offices, he knew the yin and yang of the revenue land proceedings.

Taking advantage of this, he helped Karunakar to create duplicate passbooks and sold it to the farmers to help them secure agriculture loans illegally from the banks by mortgaging the duplicate land passbooks.

Another accused Gopal Rao, who is acting as a social worker, also colluded with the main culprit and helped them in selling the duplicate passbooks to the farmers. “Based on the information given by the prime accused, we have arrested two more persons and came to know that as many as 10,000 duplicate land passbooks have been printed in Gadak area of Karnataka state.

We are still questioning some more people and trying to find out the complete network involving this duplicate land passbook scam in the district,” informed Vijay kumar, SP, Jogulamba Gadwal.