BRS opens 22A helpdesk. Congress ducks
Harish Rao sets up a 10-lawyer legal cell at Telangana Bhavan for owners stuck in Section 22A. The BJP is nowhere, and the Congress government in Telangana has yet to explain how people are meant to get off a prohibited list the courts say must be transparent.
Owners seeking clarity find a legal cell, but no public 22A list or timetable.
BRS has moved first. Harish Rao announced a 10-member legal cell at Telangana Bhavan to give free legal help to owners whose properties are locked under Section 22A. The panel, led by advocate Kalyan, will guide filings and cases; a party contact number was shared at the event. According to reports from the two outlets that covered the meeting, the party also told owners not to sell cheap or pay “commissions”.
The Congress government in Telangana has not produced a white paper or a working, public, dated list that owners can check against — the bare minimum when the High Court has already spelt out the process: identify the precise 22A clause, publish the list on the government website, and decide deletion applications within six weeks. The court even said furnish extracts within 10 days on request. If the state can’t meet a 10‑day copy-paste, that’s not complexity; that’s avoidance.
The BRS threat is political and explicit: if the government doesn’t act “in one or two days”, they will take affected owners to the Chief Minister’s residence. That’s pressure the Congress invited by keeping people in limbo and hiding behind jargon.
What is established today is the BRS move and the court-and-audit context. Allegations about particular survey numbers, overnight deletions and “30%” cuts are Harish Rao’s charges, reported as such; the documents weren’t produced in the material reviewed. The bigger point the Congress can’t wish away: the CAG flagged that as of March 2020 there were 12.90 lakh “prohibited” properties with missing basics like door numbers and boundaries, and a system that could even accept pieces of a prohibited survey for registration. When your own audit says the database can’t tell what’s what, the burden is on the state to clean it up and show its work.
The BJP, busy discovering Telangana every election cycle, is missing from this queue — no plan, no legal help, just noise when the cameras are on. The BRS at least put lawyers on the table and a clock on the government. The Congress government in Telangana should try answering with lists, orders and dates — unless it prefers another photo-op at the gate of its own residence.