A taciturn man in a black SUV started buying up tracts of arid agricultural land around this small town in the western Indian state of Rajasthan in 2009.
He would sit in the parking lot outside the one-story concrete building that houses the land office and dole out cash for sellers from the back seat, according to real-estate brokers and a local government land official.
The buyer represented by the man in the SUV, according to state land records, was Robert Vadra, a member of India’s powerful Nehru-Gandhi political clan, whose Congress party leads the country today and has for much of its more-than-66-year post-colonial history.
Soon after he began buying, the federal government announced plans to promote large-scale solar-energy production, a land-intensive project for which the area was well-suited. He continued buying land, and in 2011 the state, too, announced solar incentives. The value of the land Mr. Vadra bought soared sixfold within three years, a state record of land transactions shows.-from WSJ
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