Telangana Asked for Clear Titles, Got a Political Warranty
The government has put land records on committee time while opposition names receive premium administrative attention.
Telangana’s land crisis has finally achieved administrative clarity: nobody knows who owns what, but the government knows whose names to announce. Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy’s latest answer to the Section 22-A mess is a high-level committee, a 30-day deadline and a fresh political excursion into the landholdings of KCR, KTR and Harish Rao. The state’s records may remain uncertain. The targets are not.
The scale is not small enough to be solved by a speech and a dramatic pause. The prohibited list covers about 98.31 lakh acres. The disputed private patta portion, by the Chief Minister’s account, is around 3.73 lakh acres, down from roughly 7.91 lakh acres inherited from the BRS-era system. That is presented as progress. For landowners who still cannot register property, progress appears to mean the queue has acquired better statistics.
Revanth Reddy has promised notices, 15 days to produce documents, speaking orders, audio recordings, appeals within 60 days and revisions within 90 days. This is an impressive amount of procedure for citizens whose immediate demand is usually more modest: that the administration identify the correct survey number before recording the proceedings. The committee will recommend remedies in 30 days, because nothing reassures a trapped landowner like a deadline attached to an institution that has not yet fixed the problem.
The Congress government says Dharani and the previous BRS administration created the mess. The BRS says the Revanth government is misusing the 22-A list. KTR has called it the “biggest scam” and alleged a scam behind every Revanth scheme; those remain allegations, not findings. The government’s counter is to examine the lands of BRS leaders, which is also an allegation until an inquiry produces more than political heat and a carefully timed announcement. Both sides have discovered that land records make excellent campaign material. Neither has yet made them reliable public records.
Telangana’s landowners asked for clean titles. The government supplied a committee with guest appearances by the opposition.
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