Revanth’s Land Policy: Blame Everyone, Register Nothing

Telangana’s 22-A land crisis has finally received the one administrative resource it was missing: a three-hour monologue from Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy. The promised “permanent solution” comes with committees, e-KYC, newspaper notices, fresh guidelines and other mechanisms whose natural habitat is a government file marked under process. Immediate relief, meanwhile, remains under examination by the examination committee.

The numbers make the performance harder to applaud. The prohibited list covers nearly 98 lakh acres. Revanth says genuinely disputed private patta land is 3.73 lakh acres, down from 7.91 lakh acres in 2020, and admits that much of the land trapped in the list belongs to its present owners. The state has therefore achieved the rare feat of discovering that citizens own their property, then preventing them from using the discovery. In the Kancha Gachibowli example cited by the Chief Minister, a dispute involving roughly five acres allegedly affected registrations across the remaining 2,395 acres. One small question mark has been given the administrative reach of a district.

The government’s explanation is that revenue officials are afraid of suspension and ACB action, so they avoid registering anything without precise demarcation. This is presented as a flaw in the inherited system, though the Congress government has been in office since December 2023. At some point, “we inherited it” stops being an explanation and becomes a tenancy agreement. The solution is apparently to appoint committees to study why officials will not act, while citizens continue to wait for the state to decide whether their own land exists.

There was one deadline, however. Revanth Reddy ordered a survey of K Chandrashekhar Rao’s family lands, referred to an alleged 440 acres, and demanded a report within 30 days. The much larger problem affecting thousands of private owners received no matching countdown. In the same Assembly session, the Chief Minister revived an unsubstantiated “black magic” allegation against BRS leaders. Telangana’s land records are frozen, registrations are blocked, and the government brought occult politics to the floor. It did not need a séance. It needed a sub-registrar to register a valid document.

KCR’s land gets a deadline; Telangana’s land gets a committee.