Upcoming Jewar airport triggers land rush and with it, a rise in scams

“They told us a part of this land belonged to some farmers but that would not be an issue. Between March 2022 and July 2022, they pretended to register around 24 land deals in our names. But in September that year, when we asked them to get our names on the revenue records, they started making excuses. By then, we had already paid them over Rs 24 crore, half of the amount we had fixed. We then decided to see the land and discovered that it never existed,” says Gaurav.

The mastermind of the scam, Ravinder Sharma, was arrested by the Central Noida Police on July 20, 2025.

Those running the real-estate firms are mostly farmers and gram panchayat members, whose land had been acquired for the airport. (Express Photo by Abhinav Saha)

Part of the National Capital Region, Jewar, riding on the real estate boom that has accompanied the construction of the new airport, has in the last few years witnessed a spike in land sales – and with it, a rise in cases of real estate fraud.

Greater Noida Deputy Commissioner of Police Saad Miya Khan said that in the last two years alone, they had registered at least 20 cases against those involved in fraudulent land deals. “On an average, there is one FIR registered every month of people being duped in the name of buying property near the airport,” said Khan.

Vehicles parked outside several Real Estate companies on Friday afternoon, 3.3 kms away from Noida International Airport. (Express Photo by Abhinav Saha)

Police in Gautam Buddha Nagar, of which Jewar is a part, say each of these cases is an elaborate act of fraud involving everything from fake plots to doctored maps and the same plot being sold to multiple people.

“Ravinder Sharma and the others told us they had links with some political families. We believed them. It was so well planned that everything they said appeared to be true. Everything was fake – from registration and bank documents to the ‘farmers’ and ‘lawyers’ who they produced before us,” says Gaurav.

A string of real estate firms

On a recent visit, The Indian Express noticed that the approach to the upcoming Noida International Airport, once an expanse of farmland, is lined with a string of real estate offices, many with prominent, neon-lit sign boards. Inside, most of these are air-conditioned spaces with CCTV cameras, mini-fridges, couches and private cabins for business meetings.

Those running the real-estate firms are mostly farmers and gram panchayat members, whose land had been acquired for the airport.

At his office in Sabota Mustafabad, around 4 km from the airport, farmer-turned-realtor Satish Kumar, 40, says those duping people are “outsiders”. “We have been farmers here, if we commit a fraud, we will be caught. People know us,” he says. He set up his business, Signature Realty, in 2020 with Riyasat Ali, a farmer in Kishorpur village.

Scam victims point to land ‘sold’ to them in Aligarh’s Goraula village, 33 km from Jewar airport (Express Photo by Abhinav Saha)

Ved Prakash Sharma, 58, of Jewar Land Service, which was established in 2017, says property rates in the area have shot up since 2012, around the time land survey for the airport project began in Jewar. “Those days, 1,000 gaj or square yards cost Rs 4 lakh; that has gone up to Rs 35 lakh now. The price also depends on whether the land is facing the highway, how far it is from the airport or the main road etc. We can show you all kinds of property,” he says.

Police say the new airport has had an impact on land prices not just in Jewar and Gautam Buddha Nagar, but in the adjoining districts of Ghaziabad, Bulandshahr and Aligarh, as a result of which the scope of the scam has expanded to these areas too.

Maa Lakshmi Real Estate and a board of Signature Realty selling 100 square yards for Rs. 15,500.(Express Photo by Abhinav Saha)

Central Noida’s Deputy Commissioner of Police Shakti Mohan Avasthy said, “These fraudsters lure victims by creating fake websites and putting up advertisements. This is a problem across districts that touch the boundaries of the airport.”

It’s a fraud that’s riding on the high demand for land in Jewar, where, officials say, circle rates for agricultural land are proposed to go up from the existing Rs 900 per square metre to Rs 1,550 in the next revision — a 70 per cent jump that is a sign of the surging real-estate market in the region.

Beyond Jewar

On July 19, the Aligarh Police uncovered a land scam worth over Rs 60.89 crore. Their investigation revealed that representatives of Noida-based JSM Pro Infratech Pvt. Ltd had allegedly been posing as real estate developers and duping farmers, small investors, and officials of the Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA) and the Revenue Department.

Talking about the investigation, Aligarh Superintendent of Police (Rural) Amrit Jain said their team posed as prospective land buyers and attended a camp organised by the real-estate firm.

“We learnt that the company organises a camp every weekend. We visited one of these camps and uncovered an elaborate set-up. They would display notified YEIDA plots on a doctored map with a vision of a future township. But these plots did not belong to them,” he says.

Jitendra Prasad Singh, a 40-year-old daily wager at a private firm in Noida, was among those who were duped. In May 2022, Jitendra met Kiran, an acquaintance, who informed him about plots being developed by JSM Pro Infratech near Goraula village in Aligarh, 33 km from the Jewar airport.

For Jitendra, a migrant from Saran district of Bihar, owning a plot in the NCR seemed like the route to a better future. Singh was introduced to representatives of JSM, who operated out of an office in Noida’s Sector 53.

After hours of discussion over a map – which police later established was a doctored one – the deal was allegedly settled. “They showed me a piece of land on the map. It was a 50-square-yard plot marked as D-648, priced at Rs 3.15 lakh. I was a labourer, the money was steep, but to own a plot seemed like a dream come true,” he said.

Jitendra transferred Rs 35,000 to the bank account of the company and received a ‘booking agreement’ on July 15, 2022. “After paying an additional Rs 6,300 as the first installment, I said I want to see the land I had bought,” he says.

Banwari Bas, Ved Prakash Sharma and Devender Kumar- three ex-gram Pradhans, running Jewar Land Service since 2019. (Express Photo by Abhinav Saha)

When Jitendra went to the site to take possession of his plot, he found out that there was no such plot.

“I saw people working in fields and asked them about the company and whether they owned plots there. I asked them about the company and whether they owned plots here. They said many like me had been turning up and enquiring about plots that didn’t exist,” he says.

In April, based on Jitendra’s complaint, police registered an FIR under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections related to cheating and criminal intimidation, among others.

SP Jain said, “There are at least 25 FIRs against members of this firm. We found that they have been operating since 2020.”

On June 16, senior members of the firm – including Ajit Kumar Raman, 45, Shravan Kumar, 47, and Praveen Kumar Patel, 45 –got a stay on their arrest from the Allahabad High Court.

The Aligarh Police’s probe revealed that members of the real-estate firm also allegedly targeted small farmers and fraudulently carried out land transactions in their names.

In September 2021, Jainendra Kumar Laur, a 30-year-old farmer from Aligarh’s Goraula village, was watering his millet crop when three men pulled up in a car and told him they were looking to buy a piece of agricultural land. For Jainendra, weighed down by a debt of Rs 20 lakh, the offer felt like an opportunity.

“I had borrowed heavily for the treatment of my father’s brain cancer. I lost him in 2019, but the debts kept piling up. So when these people approached me with an offer to buy my land, I agreed,” says Jainendra.

“I agreed to sell just 0.154 hectares, enough to pay off my loans. The sale deed was executed on September 21, 2021, and everything seemed fine. But a year later, a man visited my farm with documents saying that I had sold 1.154 hectares of my land to him. The documents had my forged signature,” he said.

Almost four years after the original transaction, on May 5, 2025, Jainendra lodged an FIR with the Aligarh Police.

“A total of 40,596.613 square meters of land in village Goraula, near the Yamuna Expressway, was identified as fraudulently acquired. Following the report’s submission, the police attached property worth Rs 60.89 crore,” said SP Jain.