35000 crores of defective and underreporting at Manesar ,Jalandhar and Baddi Tehsil offices

Chandigarh (The Uttam Hindu): In one of the biggest crackdowns on property-linked tax evasion, the Intelligence and Criminal Investigation (I&CI) Directorate of the Income Tax Department, Chandigarh, on Monday swooped down on Tehsildar Manesar, Tehsildar Jalandhar-1 and Tehsildar Baddi.

What began as a routine verification has exploded into a sensational revelation of unreported property transactions worth more than ₹35,000 crore.

The Shocking Findings

• Hundreds of high-value property deals were either not reported at all or were reported with fake/incorrect PAN details.

• Large transactions worth crores were found missing from official records, allowing them to escape tax scrutiny.

• In several cases, deals were reported without even basic buyer-seller details, making it impossible to verify identities or tax payments.

Officials matched data from state registry software with what tehsildars had filed with the IT Department. The mismatch was staggering. Deals worth thousands of crores vanished in the paperwork, ensuring they never came under the tax scanner.

This isn’t the first such action. Similar raids in Khanna, Amritsar, Ludhiana, Mohali, Fazilka and Jammu have earlier exposed widespread malpractice. Despite repeated awareness drives and training sessions, tehsildars continue to under-report or misreport, forcing the Department to resort to tough enforcement.

The Department’s Stand

Officials say these raids are not just about busting scams but about “widening India’s tax base” and ensuring no high-value transaction slips through.

With ₹35,000 crore already under the scanner, this could well snowball into one of the largest property transaction scams ever unearthed in the region.