Real Estate Fraud: At least 38 JNU, IIT-Delhi professors duped of crores by colleague

Several professors of JNU and other institutions have accused a former JNU employee of duping them of crores of rupees promising them homes on a DDA plot under a housing development scheme which was never thereAfter waiting for over seven years when these academics did not get anything except hollow promises their patience ran out and they lodged a formal complaint with the Delhi PolicePrima facie police have found incriminating evidence against the accused in the matter and have lodged an FIRIn 2015 just before he was due retirement Dr DP Gaikwad a technical staff in the Department of Environmental Science of JNU floated a society and named it Noble SocioScientific Welfare Organization NSSWOHe sold its membership to his peers claiming that the society owned land in the LZone in Dwarka Najafgarh Area under the Land Pooling Policy He collected from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 16 lakh each from the academic and nonacademic staff of JNU IITDelhi and other nearby institutions for three years in various installments assuring them that the project was onAlso read Air India peeing incident Delhi Police arrests accused from BengaluruTo make it appear real he took several of us to show a piece of land but later it turned out that NSSWO was not the owner of the land Professor Gobardhan Das Chairperson Molecular Medicine JNU saidAfter collecting a hefty amount by cheating all the members he stopped communicating and blocked all his phone numbers Das a victim of the scam saidAfter he went incommunicado he was however traced in Gurugram by some professors who went there to confront him All the same he again reeled them in with the offer of another lucrative schemeHe continued to play his trick of cheating and in February 2019 he offered to transfer our membership of NSSWO to another entity named Siddhartha Officers Housing and Social Welfare Society SOHSWS through which our flats were to be delivered however with a significantly escalated cost Prof Biswajit Kundu from IITDelhi one of the 10 complainants in the FIR saidHe didnt give any explanation for doing so nor did he provide any details of any consequent changes in the agreement In spite of repeated requests by several members he never called a general body meeting of either society nor took consent from the members of NSSWO for the changes made unilaterally Kundu addedGaikwad himself admitted that there are 38 professors from JNU who have invested in the project Das saidThere are two from IIT and many more from other nearby institutions as far as I know Initially in a few cases he returned 50 to 80 per cent money when he was forced to do so but later he simply refused to return any money Das addedDr Bindu Dey a former senior scientist in the Department of Biotechnology in the Ministry of Science and Technology was another victim of Gaikwad Having lost Rs 8 lakh in a bogus scheme Dey in 2018 filed a complaint against Gaikwad at Vasant Kunj Police Station where an FIR was lodged against himHe collected Rs 16 lakh from me in the name of offering an affordable home but kept delaying with one excuse or the other After a lot of persuasion and followup he returned Rs 8 lakh but the remaining amount is still with him Dey who retired from the DBT saidThese academics are the latest in a huge list of victims of real estate fraud in the LZone where the Delhi Development Authority had first announced the Land Pooling Policy around 2014Before the policy could take the final shape many housing schemes were floated and till date thousands of people have been defraudedDespite DDAs advisories cautioning people against making any investment in the Lzone in various newspapers people in need of an affordable home continued to invest and falling prey to fraudsThe DDA amended the policy in 2018 but still there is a whole lot of ambiguity around it Investing here is a trap for any prospective homebuyer I advise people to stay away from it Amit Jain a real estate expert saidThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever