Hyderabad: Days after the Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) president Revanth Reddy alleged that the TRS government auctioned off land to its benamis or close friends of chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, the state government rubbished these claims and stated that the allegations were leveled just to malign it.
The state government earned a total of Rs 2,729.78 crore from 13 plots in Kokapet and Khanamet.
A government statement here remarked that the auction of lands by the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority (HMDA) and the Telangana State Industrial Infrastructure Corporation (TSIIC) were legitimate and there was no scam in the auctions held on July 15 and 16.
The government’s stance is that the auctioned off lands in areas of Kokapet and Khanamet were conducted by the Public Service Undertaking, MSTC Ltd via online bidding.
Responding to Revanth Reddy’s call for re-auctioning of lands under the swiss challenge, the government maintained that in the absence of market-discovered price, it isn’t sensible to attempt the swiss challenge method. Doing that would prevent either higher actual market-determined realization or prove to be an entry barrier for many firms, it said.
The government also added that the swiss challenge method becomes restrictive by nature and curbs competition. To reinforce the idea that all competition was allowed, the State government stated that bid notification details were made available to all paper advertisement campaigns.
Revanth Reddy had alleged that with the exception of Rameswar Rao’s My Home Group, it was Siddipet Collector, who largely benefited from this auction and he had subsequently discouraged national companies from bidding.
Reacting to that, the state government responded that every individual who wanted to take part in the auction had to register in MSTC’s website and nobody influenced the auction in any way.
The state government concluded that allegations of bias or scamming were thus unfounded and done just to malign its efforts to maintain transparency.