22-A errors, 0 accountability
BRS wants a sitting-judge probe, a white paper and the Revenue Minister sacked. The Congress government admits mistakes, promises fixes, and hopes that is the end of it.
The government has announced fixes for wrongly blocked properties, but not yet the full record of how they were blocked.
BRS deputy floor leader T Harish Rao on Sunday demanded a judicial inquiry by a sitting judge, a white paper, publication of the entire Section 22-A prohibited-properties list with records, removal of access restrictions, and the immediate dismissal of Revenue Minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy. He met families in Shapur Nagar and said the Congress-run administration had failed to protect property rights. (According to the report that recorded his remarks.)
What the Congress government has said on the record is not that everything is fine — it is that officials made “errors in land records” and are fixing them. Revenue Minister Ponguleti has apologised, announced a high-level committee, and said privately owned properties wrongly included would be removed. He has also claimed around 98% of genuine registrations among booked slots were cleared, that orders are online, and that a helpline took 1,162 calls. Those numbers are his, not audited.
The Chief Minister’s own release earlier this month told landholders “need not worry”, and set out the technical remedy: assign sub-numbers within survey numbers so unaffected land can move while plots in court stay parked. That official phrasing concedes the core problem — entire survey numbers were blocked — and proposes a workaround instead of a reckoning.
The government’s own Bhu Bharati portal goes further in plain English: it says pattedars report cases where only a small extent was acquired but the “entire survey number is categorized as acquired due to mistake in entries.” There is also a formal grievance service for wrongful inclusion in the prohibited list. When your fix is a grievance queue, the existence of the problem is no longer in dispute.
What is missing is exactly what Harish Rao asked for: the full list, the change log, and a judge-led probe into how genuine properties ended up locked and who signed off on it. The Congress government has yet to explain why that sunlight is too much to ask after it admits the shade was its own doing.
BRS’s sharper corruption charges — “commission racket”, middlemen, an unnamed MLA — are allegations and remain theirs to prove. The documented part is simpler and damning enough: wrongful entries happened; people got stuck; the remedy is committees, sub-numbering and a helpline. A white paper with figures, orders and accountability would beat a sorry-and-move-on speech. The Congress government in Telangana still hasn’t bothered to produce one.