It began with guava trees that were never there.
A decade after the Greater Mohali Area Development Authority (GMADA) began acquiring land near Chandigarh international airport to build the Aerotropolis — one of the most ambitious planned urban projects in North India’s history — a brazen fraud involving fictitious orchards, forged revenue records, colluding government officials, and crores in fraudulent compensation has stalled development in four critical pockets of the project.
This has also left genuine farmers without their rightful payments, and cast a long shadow over the state’s entire land acquisition machinery.
The guava orchard scam, as it has come to be known, is not merely a crime story. It is the story of how institutional failure at multiple levels — in GMADA, the revenue department, the horticulture department, and among senior IAS officers — derailed a project that lakhs of farmers, homebuyers, investors, and Tricity residents had a direct stake in. And as the Punjab Government now attempts to break the deadlock, by depositing pending compensation in court, releasing payments for unaffected structures, and framing a new transparent assessment policy, the question is not just who did it and how, but what it will take to ensure it never happens again.
The setting: what was the aerotropolis?
In 2016, GMADA formally commenced the acquisition of over 1,600 acres of land across multiple villages in Mohali for the Aerotropolis Residential Project, a large-scale township conceived as a direct extension of the already-built Aerocity near Chandigarh’s international airport.
The project envisaged over 8,500 residential units alongside commercial development, designed to capitalise on the airport’s connectivity and the surrounding IT City ecosystem.
Acquisition notifications were issued for Pockets A, B, C and D, covering villages including Bakarpur, Naraingarh, Safipur and others. Land acquisition proceedings moved forward. What the authorities did not immediately detect was that a parallel criminal enterprise was already in motion.
The fraud: How it worked
Under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, landowners are entitled to compensation not just for their land but for all assets standing on it, including fruit-bearing trees, structures, tubewells and other improvements. The compensation for fruit trees is calculated separately, based on the quality, age, and density of the orchard.
A group of accused, led by property dealer Bhupinder Singh and including Vikas Bhandari, Mukesh Jindal and others, identified this provision as their opportunity. Armed with insider information about which parcels were under acquisition, information allegedly leaked by senior GMADA officials, they began purchasing land in the affected villages at prevailing agricultural market prices, sometimes forcing reluctant landowners to sell at below-market rates.
Having acquired the land, they set about creating fictitious guava orchards on it. In reality, as the Vigilance Bureau later told the Punjab and Haryana High Court, approximately 90 per cent of the land was under normal wheat and paddy cultivation. On the remaining portions, the accused planted guava saplings, not mature, fruit-bearing orchards, but young plants that would not ordinarily qualify for significant compensation.
What turned saplings into a Rs 147-crore fraud was the systematic corruption of official records. The original Khasra Girdawari revenue registers of Bakarpur village, covering the period 2016 to 2021, were destroyed. A forged set of records was prepared in 2019, in collusion with revenue patwari Bachittar Singh, falsely reflecting the presence of mature, established guava orchards across the acquired parcels. When the Land Acquisition Collector asked the horticulture department to assess the value of the orchards, Horticulture Development Officer Jaspreet Singh Sidhu allegedly produced tailor-made assessment reports certifying the trees as over three years old, the threshold for higher compensation, and recording inflated densities and ages to maximise the payout.
The result: compensation worth Rs 123 crore was released to 101 beneficiaries without any ground-level checks, according to the Vigilance Bureau’s status report filed before the Punjab and Haryana High Court. Bhupinder Singh and his family members alone received approximately Rs 24 crore. The family of the then GMADA Additional Chief Administrator, who oversaw the Aerotropolis project from 2017 to 2021, allegedly received Rs 1.67 crore as compensation for a guava orchard purchased in collusion with Bhupinder Singh. Another accused, Mukesh Jindal, and his family received Rs 20 crore. The total fraudulent payout is estimated at Rs 147 crore.
The fraud was registered as FIR No. 16 by the Punjab Vigilance Bureau. To date, seven government officials and 16 other individuals have been arrested. The Enforcement Directorate has entered the case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, filing a prosecution complaint before a special PMLA court in Mohali against Bhupinder Singh, Vikas Bhandari and 14 others. Assets worth over Rs 9.87 crore have been provisionally attached, Rs 3.89 crore in cash seized, and a cumulative Rs 100 crore in fraudulently obtained compensation has been returned, either by voluntary surrender or through court deposits by accused seeking anticipatory bail.
The collateral damage: Who suffers
Here is the part that rarely receives adequate attention in the legal and political discourse around the scam: the genuine landowners of the affected villages — farmers who had nothing to do with the fraud, who gave up their land for a promised township, and who are now caught in a judicial and administrative logjam not of their making.
Because the FIR is active and the High Court has kept in abeyance a 2022 order by the Additional Chief Secretary, Housing and Urban Development, that mandated aerial photography and a joint inspection report before any further payments, GMADA has been unable to clear pending compensation to legitimate landowners whose structures and orchards are not even mentioned in the FIR. The entire payment machinery for Pockets A, B, C and D has effectively been frozen, genuine cases caught in the dragnet meant for the fraudulent ones.
Development works on the ground have stalled proportionately. A project conceived in 2016, for which acquisition notifications were issued in 2019, remains unbuilt in its earliest pockets while the state has now moved ahead with acquiring land for Aerotropolis Blocks E, F, G, H, I and J, an additional 3,535 acres, and even a separate 2,489-acre Aerotropolis Extension in Banur.
Homebuyers and investors who had expectations built around the Aerotropolis township have been left in a state of prolonged uncertainty. Tricity residents who were counting on the project to ease the region’s acute housing shortage have seen a key supply pipeline remain shut.
The government’s response: too little, too late?
At a high-level meeting held recently, the government took the first concrete steps to break the deadlock. It has been decided that all pending cash compensation and other payments in Pockets A, B, C and D will be deposited by the Land Acquisition Collector in the Reference Court, enabling GMADA to take legal possession of the land and begin development even while the FIR proceedings continue. Compensation for structures and orchards not specifically named in the FIR will be released directly to landowners. Those covered under the FIR will be deposited in court.
A new transparent policy for the assessment of structures and orchards will be separately framed to prevent a repeat.
These are sensible, overdue steps. But they raise as many questions as they answer.
What needs to be done: The bigger picture
The guava orchard scam is a symptom of a systemic vulnerability that exists not just in Aerotropolis but in every large-scale land acquisition exercise where compensation is determined by on-ground assessment of assets by officials who have discretionary power and limited accountability.
Several structural fixes are urgently needed, and Punjab’s experience offers a blueprint, both of what can go catastrophically wrong and of how to build guardrails against it.
First, the orchard and structure assessment process must be completely overhauled. The new transparent assessment policy promised by the government must mandate satellite and drone imagery as the baseline for all tree and structure valuation, not as an optional audit tool to be ordered after the fact but as a mandatory first step before any compensation is calculated. Cross-verification by at least two independent departments, with records uploaded in real time to a public portal, should be non-negotiable.
Second, insider trading in land under acquisition, the practice of buying land cheaply after learning of an upcoming notification, needs a specific legal deterrent. The accused in the guava scam exploited this window systematically. A mandatory pre-notification land transfer freeze, combined with criminal liability for officials who leak acquisition information, would close this gap.
Third, the Reference Court route, now being used to unlock the Aerotropolis A-D payments, is a workaround, not a solution. Thousands of legitimate landowners cannot be expected to wait years for court-directed release of payments that are rightfully theirs. A ring-fencing mechanism, clearly separating disputed and undisputed compensation claims within the same acquisition, needs to be institutionalised in the Act itself so that the innocent are not held hostage to proceedings against the guilty.
Fourth, the three-year development completion timeline now committed to by the government for all projects, a significant new concession extracted by protesting farmers, must be backed by financial penalties and independent oversight. Every previous urban development promise in the Mohali-New Chandigarh belt has slipped. The Aerotropolis itself is proof of what happens when timelines are aspirational rather than enforceable.
Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, the reform of the horticulture and revenue departments’ role in compensation assessment, the twin pillars on which the guava orchard fraud rested, cannot wait for the next scam. Independent, technology-backed valuation agencies with no departmental link to the acquiring authority need to be brought in for all future assessments above a threshold value.
What it means for farmers & tricity residents
For the lakhs of farmers across the 11,103-acre acquisition belt, now extended further with the addition of Eco City-4 across 526 acres in New Chandigarh, the guava scam has one direct and one indirect consequence.
The direct consequence is the delay it has caused to genuine compensation payments and development in Aerotropolis A-D. The indirect consequence is the trust deficit it has created: when farmers at the recent meeting demanded a fixed development timeline, transparency in plot allotment, free conveyance deeds and a longer Sahuliyat Certificate validity, they were not simply negotiating benefits. They were asking for institutional guarantees against the kind of administrative failure that produced the guava scam in the first place.
For Tricity residents in Chandigarh, Mohali and Panchkula, the Aerotropolis and the broader New Chandigarh-Greater Mohali development plan represent the only meaningful near-term answer to the region’s severe housing and commercial space crunch. Chandigarh’s own housing supply is essentially frozen, hemmed in by its Union Territory status and heritage restrictions. Mohali and New Chandigarh are where the pressure has to be absorbed. Every month of delay in Aerotropolis A-D is a month of supply that the market does not get.
Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann has framed the entire exercise as Punjab’s urban renaissance — a chance to build something bigger and bolder than Chandigarh itself, with Sector 87 rising as Mohali’s answer to Sector 17 and the Aerotropolis becoming the region’s commercial engine. That vision is real and within reach. But it will be built on the foundations laid or neglected in how the state handles the aftermath of its most embarrassing institutional failure.
The guava orchards were fake. The damage they caused is entirely real. And the test of whether Punjab’s urban ambitions are serious lies not just in how many acres it acquires but in whether it can guarantee that what happened in Bakarpur village in 2016 can never happen again.
