22-A: apology now, audit when?
Revenue Minister Ponguleti says errors in Telangana’s Section 22-A prohibited list hit private owners — apologises, promises fixes. BRS wants a judicial probe and a white paper. The BJP-led Centre is nowhere in this; the Congress government in Telangana owns the mess and the clean-up.
The government has promised corrections; the underlying list and order trail remain unpublished.
Telangana’s Revenue Minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy has admitted what property owners have been telling sub-registrars for weeks: private land ended up on the Section 22-A prohibited list, blocking sales and mortgages. He apologised on 17 August and said wrongly included private properties will be removed. A committee will meet weekly to clear cases, he said, adding Medchal–Malkajgiri alone had 511 pending applications as of that date. According to his account, some survey numbers were blanket-listed when only a slice was actually restricted — he cited a Jubilee Hills survey number and a 12-acre parcel in Rangareddy where just two acres were Bhoodan land.
The government’s defence is the familiar one: 22-A exists to stop government, endowment, Waqf, forest, ULC, assigned and disputed lands from being fraudulently registered. On claimed progress, the minister’s numbers don’t line up across reports — one says 98% of “genuine” booked registrations were cleared, another says 38% of 960 complaints resolved, a third talks up ~90% of 980 inquiries. None came with a public dashboard or an order book a buyer can check.
BRS’s T. Harish Rao has demanded a judicial probe and a white paper on every addition since 7 December 2023, alleging indiscriminate inclusion of private and patta properties. Those are political allegations until the records land; the ask — publish the list, the changes, and the orders — is basic governance. The Congress government in Telangana says it will fix it; it has not yet produced the audit trail to prove it has.
One ministerial claim says 522 acres were protected from fake papers, and another outlet attributes a 23,136-acre deletion and a 3.78-lakh-acre remainder to a Revenue report. Those figures are the government’s to show; the underlying report was not public in the material reviewed. Meanwhile, owners in Hyderabad, Medchal–Malkajgiri, Rangareddy and Sangareddy have discovered they are “protected” from using their own property.
Section 22-A is meant to protect public land. It is not meant to be a trapdoor for private owners. The Congress government in Telangana has promised corrections by end-August in districts; what it hasn’t done is publish the dataset and the order numbers. Until it does, it’s an apology tour without the receipts — and the Assembly will remind it on 7 September.