Baba Ramdev used to once talk of ending black money. But his Patanjali group has a web of shell firms that trade in Aravalli forests for huge profits. @shreegireesh
& @tapasya_umm at @reporters_co studied hundreds of corporate & land records to expose their modus operandi.
In 2015, Haryana CM offered Ramdev a Cabinet Minister rank. He declined. He said, the gov't and the Centre and state were his anyway.
He was right.
Haryana government ensured that portions of Aravallis' didn't get legal cover. Allowing dubious real-estate firms to profit off them.
What we dug out - the modus operandi of Patanjali's shell firms trading in Aravalli forests.
These firms were buoyed by money from promoters- Ramdev's right hand man Acharya Balkrishna, his brother Ram Bharat and other close associates.
What did they do with this money?
Before I go further, we have made public all the documents- corporate filings and Haryana's land records- used in our investigative series on Patanjali's dubious land deals.
You can access them here.
Over months @reporters_co analyzed 10+ years of financials records of over a 100 Patanjali companies. Linked them to 100s of state land records. To bring out the truth.
Work like this takes immense resources.
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Back to the story.
Patanjali's shell firms got a slush of funds from Patanjali's main men and related companies.
Instead of using this money to do their professed business, the firms bought vast tracts of land in Mangar village, Faridabad. In the Aravalli forests.
Take these examples- Patanjali Corrupack and Kankhal Ayurveda Pvt. Ltd. were incorporated for manufacturing and trading in packaging material and ayurvedic medicines respectively.
They said they were buying lands to support their stated business.
They lied.
They did not do the business they claimed to. These firms masqueraded as Ayurveda and packaging businesses but were real-estate dealers in reality.
They used the money to buy and sell lands. To make a killing. The super-profits were pumped back into other Patanjali group firms.
Kankhal Ayurveda made a whopping 365% profit selling over 41 acres of land in Mangar village in 2011 to a real-estate company.
To govt they had claimed these lands were to set up industry to manufacture ayurvedic medicines and products.
The money it made was advanced to 16 Patanjali-linked firms, Acharya Balkrishna and even a Nepalese airlines company.
Advances were made to several individuals to buy more lands in other parts of the country.
Kankhal Ayurveda still holds 2.5 acres of land in Mangar. Patanjali Corrupack holds over 1.2 acres.
On average, one acre of land can house 7 buildings with ten 2BHK flats each. Imagine, buying a forestland dirt cheap and then selling it as super priced real estate land.
Kankhal isn't alone. The investigation also found:
At least 14 firms and 2 trusts linked to the Patanjali group have traded Mangar forestlands.
Out of these, at least 4 firms + 1 trust sold off lands to real-estate players. And, 12 firms + 1 trust still hold over 123 acres.
Read Part 1 of the series here.
The Patanjali group stands to gain further from trading these lands.
How?
This is where the amendments Union gov't has recently made to the Forest Conservation Act come in to play.
In August this year, the forest law was altered. The new law removes legal protection given to lands that fit the dictionary meaning of a forest but are not officially recorded as such.
Mangar's forests fall in this category. They are now open to real-estate profiteering.
In a 1996 order, the SC asked states to record such areas as forests and bring them under the protective cover of the Central forest law.
But Haryana govt never did it.
It instead put large tracts of Aravallis in the "status to be decided" category.
Now their fate is decided.
Haryana gov't had multiple other legal routes to protect Aravallis'. Including Mangar's forestlands.
But it chose to stay inactive on all those counts.
Keeping Aravallis open for real-estate businesses, including Patanjali's dubious land deals.
Other legal routes that Haryana Gov't blocked:
It kept these lands off the state's conservation law that restricts deforestation and commercial activities on ecologically fragile lands. The Punjab Land Preservation Act or PLPA.
It also did not implement last year's Supreme Court orders to vest control of these lands with panchayats. These were previously common lands that were privatized.
State's panchayat department needs to initiate legal proceedings to get the land back. It hasn't done that.
Instead, Haryana was part of drafting a regional plan in 2021 that removed Aravallis from the "Natural Conservation Zone". This would lift curbs on construction that earlier regional plans had put in place.
Haryana government's denial of legal cover to these lands laid a fertile ground for a shady real-estate businesses.
And Patanjali group has emerged a significant player.
We mapped Patanjali's land holdings in Mangar village.
This was done using a revenue map of the village and parsing through the state's latest digital land records till 2018-19. These records showed us details of ownership.
We found what specific plots were owned by Patanjali-linked companies.
We then pinned them on the revenue map. The yellow dots represent Patanjali's lands. The light blue area is protected by Haryana's conservation law (PLPA). Area in light green is recorded forests.
Patanjali's lands mostly fall in the uncultivable forestlands. That should've been vested with panchayats. And also recorded as forests.
None of that has happened.
Read Part 2 of the series here.
We gained from work by @jayashreenandi at Hindustan Times. she had reported about several firms holding unprotected forestlands in Aravalli's Mangar village, standing to gain from the amendments to the forest law.
Read Jayashree Nandi's work here.
And, much earlier Business Standard had shown holdings of Patanjali in another village and some of the Haryana government’s tricks that potentially benefit its holdings.
Read the Business Standard report here.
We built on this work. We unraveled the whole wide web of Patanjali affiliates, their quiet funnelling of money around and profiting off ecologically sensitive lands.
It takes a village to do good rigorous journalism.
We at the @reporters_co strive to produce evidence-based journalism in public interest. Journalism that puts the powerful under your scanner.
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This story could not have been possible without the contribution of a former (and shy) intern at @reporters_co.
@nit_set 's constant guidance and rigour helped us immensely in researching and writing the stories.
@anoophilip for editing the story.
Thanks to @vikaskrthakur and @nit_set and Somen Jaiswal for the video and graphics.
Thanks to @harshithamanwan and @taotao for handling the publication and social media.
You can stay updated with our investigations by subscribing to the letter our editor @anoophilip writes when we are ready with a story. It's worth a read for how he summaries and shares our work.
