BJP’s lakhs-of-crores scam meets the calculator
Section 22-A errors are documented. The BJP’s giant valuation is not.
The documented Section 22-A errors are narrower than the valuation claim.
The Telangana BJP has announced protests over Section 22-A properties, with party leader Alleti Maheshwar Reddy alleging that the Congress government’s actions amount to a scam worth “lakhs of crores”. The party has not, in the material reviewed, produced a land schedule, valuation exercise, audit, FIR or court finding to support that number. A very large figure remains a very large claim.
The narrower problem is real. The Telangana government’s Bhu Bharati portal provides a correction process for wrongly listed properties and specifically acknowledges that an entire survey number can be marked acquired when only part of it was acquired. Revenue Minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy also acknowledged erroneous inclusions, citing a 1,288-acre survey number where only two plots had an issue. He said the error was later corrected and that nearly 98% of genuine registrations among booked slots had been cleared.
The BJP has also alleged a Rs 15,000-crore transfer and the use of around 103 shell companies. The research reviewed contains no documents establishing either claim, and it could not confirm whether the promised evidence was submitted to the ED or CBI. The Congress government has acknowledged errors; it has not yet supplied the public record needed to settle the larger dispute. The BJP, meanwhile, has supplied the headline before supplying the arithmetic.