KCR to feature on pattadar passbooks

Hyderabad: Come January, Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao is all set to be the only politician in the post-Independence era in the country to have a unique distinction of having his portrait on the security-enabled pattadar passbooks.

According to official sources, so far, only Mahatma Gandhi portrait has been used as an integral security feature on the currency note. However, the government has decided to issue a new pattadar passbooks from January 2018, after the completion of the ongoing purification and updating of the land records.

The existing pattadar passbooks are prone to counterfeiting. To overcome this, the new passbooks will come with a host of security features like Letter Screen Image (LSI), barcoding, laminated film, dicuts (horizontal and oblique security lines), optical character recognition (OCR). Besides, it will be a waterproof-enabled document whose security features will be intact even if it is kept in water for 15 to 20 days.

And, the portrait of the Chief Minister will be an integral part of the passbook, in which, the significant portion of it contains a series of machine-readable character rows along the length of the front page of the passbook. “This makes the TRS chief to be the only chief minister and politician to be on official document with his portrait with security features a la Mahatma Gandhi on the currency notes,” an official said.

Speaking to The Hans India, a senior official from the agriculture department said that the revenue department has been assigned the work of bringing out the new passbooks. The officials, who were dealing with the passbooks, had difficulty in identifying tampering. The major problem faced by the officials of the revenue, agriculture and registrations department were photo substitution, deletion, and alteration of data, construction of a fraudulent document, or some parts of it, using material from legitimate documents. Removal and substitution, deletion of entries, assuming the identity and altered appearance and the like were the some of the problems with the present passbooks.

In some cases, the mandal revenue officials, who were transferred and those retired from the services, kept the official seals with them. They helped beneficiaries in validating the manipulated documents with their signatures and seals affixed on them with back dates. This helped many landsharks to grab government lands, to claim an adverse position of lands as well as sourcing huge sums of loans from the banks, pledging the counterfeited pattadar passbooks as well as sale deeds and agreements. The new security features of passbooks, however, would not give scope for such manipulation, the official said.