The Andhra Pradesh government on Friday constituted a fresh Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the multi-crore Vizag land scam. The scam, which surfaced in June 2017, deals with allegations of encroachments on several acres of land and tampering of records, with hundreds of complaints being made from across Visakhapatnam district.
The 3-member SIT will be headed by retired IAS officer Vijay Kumar, while another retired bureaucrat Y V Anuradha and a retired district and sessions judge T Bhaskar Rao, were appointed as members of the team.
The opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP) was quick to lash out at the YSRCP for going back on its earlier stand, of demanding a CBI probe into the incident, and instead choosing to go with an SIT under the control of the state government.
However, Anakapalle MLA Gudivada Amarnath defended the move, while speaking to reporters in Visakhapatnam on Friday.
"How could we expect a fair inquiry when the chief minister and other TDP ministers involved in the case order a state-level probe? But the situation is different now as the YSRCP is in power," Amarnath was quoted as saying.
The scam, involving several acres of land in the areas of Madhurawada and Kommadi, had kicked up a massive political storm in the state, which led to the TDP forming an SIT. The first SIT submitted its report to the Andhra Pradesh government in November last year, and reports suggested that several bureaucrats, local political leaders and one former minister were named in the findings.
When the scam first surfaced, the police had also arrested several local officials, from tehsildars to village-level officers, for allegedly tampering with land documents.