Tenant illegally takes over property, held

MUMBAI: Byculla police on Monday arrested a 58-year-old man for illegally transferring property in his name.
The accused, Aatmaram Yadav, is an employee of Hindustan Petroleum in Chembur. The police said that Yadav, who was a tenant in a one-room house at the Khoja chawl in Byculla (W), has been booked for cheating and forgery under sections 406, 420,465 and 471 of the Indian Penal Code and remanded in police custody till Friday.
The property belongs to Shivaji Jadhav, who resides in Khadki, Pune. Jadhav said the room had been purchased by his aunt, Sulabhai Rane, in the late 1970s. In 1983, Rane fell sick and decided to draw up her will in which she transferred the house to Jadhav’s father (who was her brother). Incidentally, the accused was one of the witnesses who signed the transfer deed.
“We belong to the same village and were family friends. After my aunt died in 1986, he requested my father to lease the room to him. Since we lived in Pune, my father agreed to take him as a tenant and charged almost negligible rent from him,” said Jadhav.
Jadhav’s father passed away in 2004, after which he decided to take stock of his assets. It was then that he realized that Yadav had prepared forged documents and had managed to transfer the room in his name in 1990. Jadhav moved the courts which directed the police to probe the matter. “We were probing the case for some time. An FIR was lodged on April 17 after we gathered enough evidence to book Yadav,” said inspector Prakash Satpe.