The Madras High Court has directed the Chennai District Collector to retrieve 1.05 acres of prime land fraudulently held by land grabbers in the city’s Kolathur area. Justice N Anand Venkatesh, who gave the directions on August 4, also told the Collector to reclaim the land held by some other persons in the same area on the basis of a fabricated document procured in 1976.
The judge was hearing a revision petition filed by the Chennai Collector challenging the orders of a single judge of the High Court in September last year. The HC had barred the Greater Chennai Corporation from entering its property to set up a micro waste yard and asked them to remove all the equipment from the land stating that it belonged to the respondents in the case. The respondents, however, had allegedly submitted fabricated documents in the court. Claiming that the land in dispute was ‘Anadheenam’ land, the Collector had demanded that the land be returned to the government. Anadheenam land is a piece of land that has a patta from the Revenue Department, but for which neither ownership is claimed nor taxes paid for a long time.
The judge, after scrutinising the documents, confirmed that the ‘name of the vendor’ was inserted in a wrongful way, and the name of parties and the survey numbers had been changed. He then ordered the Collector to take immediate steps to take over the lands.
“This Court cannot shut its eyes in a case where the document, on the face of it, is found to be fabricated and fraudulent only on the ground that the Civil Court has not rendered any findings on the genuineness of the document and had relied upon it and decreed the suit in favour of the petitioners,” the judge said.
The court refused the contention of the respondents that they had trusted the land registration record and should not be victimised for the alleged fraud. They came into the scene only in 1990 and had believed that the land registration record and the order of the Assistant Settlement Officer to be genuine. The judge also pulled up the officials concerned who had connived with the first purchaser of the land under question and a city civil court, which had, without ascertaining the genuineness of the documents, gone into the question of the Collector’s power to take back the property.
(With PTI inputs)