Setting the Record Straight
The state moves to streamline its land records
Telangana is invoking the ‘best practices’ followed in New Zealand and Thailand to clean up its confusing land ownership records. Some 3,600 teams of revenue and agriculture department officers are visiting all 10,875 villages to rectify land records and integrate them with the core financial banking system. Teams will camp in a village for 30 days to compile the data.
The mammoth exercise is aimed at ensuring that subsidies and other benefits, especially for farmers, reach only the eligible. “The survey and cleansing of records is required to find permanent solutions to land disputes, simplify the registration process, bring transparency in land registration and facilitate successful implementation of farm subsidy schemes,” says Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao. Farmers, he says, will be given a distinct number unique to their holdings to end unnecessary confusion and litigation.
The survey, given its scope and varied features, officials say, could serve as an example for other states. It will collate data for all land, including forests, governmentowned land, other public land, village tanks, lakes and other water bodies. Information on land alienated by government, assigned and acquired will also be recorded.
A digitised, welldocumented system of land records will be developed and farm owners issued passbooks after records have been rectified. Future registration of land holdings will also be computerised and the ITdriven system will alert owners about any transactions pertaining to their holdings. The teams are being assisted by local farmer associations and gram sabhas to decide on the true ownership of disputed tracts of land.
It’s a gargantuan venture. Telangana has 5.5 million landowners, who own 6.2 million hectares. Marginal and small holdings (under 2 ha) account for 86 per cent of the total agricultural holdings in the state.
The land survey was last done during the days of the Nizam in 1936. But the data gathered by the revenue and agriculture departments did not tally, making it difficult to implement input subsidy schemes that were rolled out by the KCR government.
KCR considers the survey vital to delivering, among other subsidies, the generous Rs 8,000 per acre per year he has promised Telangana’s farmers from May 2018.