Hyderabad: The Crime Investigation Department has begun making arrests in the alleged irregularities in Telangana's Dharani land records portal, searching the homes and offices of several suspects and taking at least four people into custody.
The four have been identified as Dade Shiva, Mangali Rajender, Dade Pavan Kalyan and A Mahesh. At least one of them is said to be a Bhu Bharati portal operator. They were produced before a court, remanded in judicial custody and lodged at the Sangareddy jail. The case was registered at Ramachandrapuram police station in July.
The transaction at the centre of it involves three acres in Kollur village, land said to be worth more than Rs 90 crore. According to the tahsildar's complaint, the parcel was recorded in one person's name and was mutated in favour of B Vinod Kumar against a registered document. The application, the complaint says, never appeared in any mutation module or workflow available to the office before June 27, 2026. No field enquiry was held, no proposal prepared, no recommendation made and no approval granted by that office.
CID officers are not discussing the details. They have said the full picture will be placed on record in the next few days.
The state has set up a seven-member Special Enquiry Team headed by DGP-rank officer Charu Sinha. It is looking at how private contractors were selected, how tenders were handled and how contracts were awarded, along with the portal's design, its system architecture and reported data security lapses.
Revenue Minister Ponguleti Srinivasa Reddy has said a forensic audit flagged more than 10,000 suspicious transactions since the portal launched in October 2020. The transactions were reported in Rangareddy, Medchal-Malkajgiri, Siddipet, Rajanna Sircilla, Sangareddy and Warangal districts. The audit covered October 2020 to December 2024, the years the BRS was in power.
Investigators are working through registrations, mutations, changes in land records and classification, beneficiary details, official approvals and digital logs. Some portal operators and others are suspected of colluding to alter ownership records. There are also allegations that titles to Bhoodan land were transferred to private parties.
Then chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao launched Dharani on October 26, 2020. The Congress government replaced it with the Bhu Bharati system, launched on April 14, 2025.