The daughters of Justice N.V. Ramana, next in line to be CJI, have been accused of criminally conspiring with a former Advocate General to illegally purchase premium land in Amaravati.
Note: This article had been removed on September 15, 2020, about an hour after it was first published, because of a gag order issued by the Andhra Pradesh high court. The article is being republished November 25, 2020, with both the original article and details of the gag order, after the Supreme Court today stayed the high court’s decision.
New Delhi: In what could snowball into a major controversy with national implications, the daughters of Justice N.V. Ramana — senior-most judge of the Supreme Court after Chief Justice of India S.A. Bobde and next in line to be CJI — have been accused of criminally conspiring with a former Advocate General of Andhra Pradesh to illegally purchase premium land in Amaravati, which until recently was to become India’s first greenfield capital city.
In an FIR registered at the office of the Director-General of the Anti-Corruption Bureau in Guntur on Wednesday, an advocate, Komatla Srinivasa Swamy Reddy, has alleged that Dammalapati Srinivas, who served as the AG during the N. Chandrababu Naidu regime, had used his influence to first gather information about the capital’s plan, and then purchase vast tracts of land accordingly in the premium core capital region.
The complainant alleged that Srinivas purchased land through multiple benamidars and relatives before December 2014, when the capital’s plan was first made public through the Capital Plan Authority Bill, 2014.
“It was alleged in the complaint that some of the public servants in high positions took advantage of their involvement in the decision-making process pertaining to the fixing of the exact location of the core capital area and that such people purchased lands for themselves either through benamidars or through their family members and associates/acquaintances after sharing the privileged information about the core capital area that they were privy to, thereby enriching themselves,” the FIR said, adding that Srinivas, then serving as the additional AG, was one such influential person to have bought lands directly or indirectly in villages that later were included as the core region of the proposed capital city.
The complainant claimed that the land value in the villages, which were included in the capital’s plan, shot up exponentially once the information was made public.
The same FIR alleged that Srinivas “entered into criminal conspiracy” with various purchasers, including Justice Ramana’s two daughters Nuthalapati Sritanuja and Nuthalapati Sribhuvana. Both Sritanuja and Sribhuvana have been named as the tenth and eleventh accused persons in the FIR, along with many of Srinivas’s family members and alleged associates.
It has been alleged that between August 13, 2014 and December 9, 2014, Srinivas and his associates purchased land in different mandals of Vijayawada and Guntur with “clear (prior) knowledge that those lands would fall either within the Core Capital Region or within the Capital Region Development Authority limits…”
Courtesy The Wire
