Ponguleti’s 45-Day Miracle for Telangana’s Landowners

Revenue Minister Ponguleti Srinivasa Reddy has unveiled Congress’s latest administrative innovation: the 45-day solution. Telangana’s Section 22-A land mess, apparently, can now be repaired in the time it takes an ordinary landowner to collect three certificates, visit four offices and hear “the officer is not available” five times.

The government’s defence is a masterpiece of numerical evasion. The prohibited list contained 96,61,026 acres of government land when Congress came to power, Ponguleti said. By August 30, it was down to 96,36,777 acres. Therefore, no undue increase. This is not quite governance. It is measuring a flooded house and announcing that the water level has fallen by one bucket.

The actual grievance is not a competition between two enormous acreage figures. It is that the list includes roughly 1.02 crore acres, including 3.73 lakh acres described as private land, while registrations and transactions can be blocked by an administrative system that turns ownership into a temporary theory. The government points to GOs 118 and 76, promises that grievances will be cleared within 45 days, and says some cases may be resolved within a month. The citizen is invited to admire the speed of a department that first needs years to create confusion and then 30 days to discover it.

Congress has also supplied the standard explanation: the problem is inherited, the allegations are exaggerated, and any errors are the work of officials. The Opposition’s demands for a judicial probe and the minister’s removal are political allegations, not established findings; Ponguleti rejects them and calls the issue a legacy problem. Fine. But responsibility is not a family heirloom that must be passed from the previous government to the next press conference. If private land is wrongly trapped, the owner does not need a historical essay. They need the record corrected.

The Revenue Department has promised a comprehensive solution. Until then, Telangana’s landowners remain the only people expected to prove that the ground beneath them exists.