Land to the Tiller
The state ushers in a sweeping reform, creating dependable digital land records using fresh surveys
Nine weeks on, the massive re- survey of all lands in Telangana, which began on September 15, has covered over half the state’s 10,885 villages. Officials have found that, of the 6.97 million acres verified, own ership records of 872,000 acres appear fuzzy. The disputed lands are either in a court logjam, trapped in boundary disputes, have claims from multiple owners or simply lack records.
Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao calls it a “purification process”, saying that once it is completed, “the hard copy of the final document with details pertaining to the holdings of every farmer will be displayed at the gram panchayat office or the village”. The CM also quoted global consultants McKinsey, saying they had in a report “pointed out that if land records were cleaned in a state, it would add two percentage points to GDP growth”.
The survey has already exposed how land was being held illegally by creating fake pattedar
( ownership) passbooks, documents and title deeds, besides other irregularities. It has shown that 300,000 acres assigned to the poor for farming have changed hands after either being sold by the beneficiaries in distress or occupied by encroachers. At least another 200,000 acres of assigned lands that have changed hands are likely to be detected by the time
the survey is over. With an eye on the next elections, despite past experience, KCR has asked revenue officials to explore the possibility of reassigning these lands to the poor. New tamper- proof passbooks with 18 safety features are also to be issued to land owners from January 26.
“Now, only Khasra Pahanis of 1954 and 1955 are being taken as standard record for settling any disputes in the revenue and civil courts. The ongoing process will make the land records up to date and factual,” said the Land Survey Mission Director Vakati Karuna. The data gathered by the 1,418 teams deployed to the 31 districts, to thoroughly cover the area, village by village, will lead to the introduction of a sophisticated system of land registry that can be accessed online, hosting data for transparency and accountability and laying bare several flourishing rackets involving waqf, endowment and forest lands. The new system will enable online updates of land transactions within hours, freeing owners from the archaic and complicated system that helped the land mafia and other encroachers.
AIMIM legislature party leader Akbaruddin Owaisi said waqf officials have turned a blind eye to the encroachment of waqf lands in all districts. This included 1,650 acres of prime land in Hyderabad, 13,480 acres of the 14,785 acres of waqf land in the Ranga Reddy district, skirting Hyderabad, and 9,189 acres of the 10,119 acres in Adilabad. This and other longpending issues like the disputes about the lands owned by the family of the Nizam of Hyderabad are likely to be resolved based on the survey findings.
There are also land parcels in dispute between different government departments, mostly revenue and forests. Earlier governments had done little to streamline the records. The ruling TRS is banking on the survey findings to ensure that its promise to grant a subsidy of Rs 4,000 an acre for each crop season can be implemented effectively without allowing the benefit to be frittered away when it is launched next year.