Telangana’s 22-A Miracle: The Land Escaped, Somehow
Congress has reduced the prohibited-list acreage. The owners are still waiting for their property to receive the memo.
The Congress government has discovered Telangana’s most advanced land-record technology: the acreage can be liberated without the land being liberated. Revenue Minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy told the Assembly that disputed private patta land in the prohibited 22-A list fell from 7.91 lakh acres in 2020 to 3.73 lakh acres in 2026. The Part-B list, he said, dropped from roughly 21 lakh acres under the BRS to 17 lakh acres now. Four lakh acres have apparently escaped. Their owners, unable to freely sell, mortgage or use the property, are still waiting for the farewell ceremony.
This is the Revanth Reddy government’s preferred administrative genre: announce progress in hectares, deliver it in PowerPoint, and leave citizens to experience the old problem at the registration office. A smaller list is not the same thing as a corrected record. One is a ministerial statistic. The other is a sale deed. Telangana’s landowners are being offered the first and asked to admire the efficiency of not receiving the second.
Harish Rao’s question was inconveniently physical: when will wrongly included private properties actually be removed from 22-A? The government’s defence, according to the Assembly exchange, is that the numbers have improved. It also faced questions over an allegedly erroneous list uploaded on 3 December 2025, reportedly because officials were short of time. Government time, in this arrangement, is elastic. Citizen time is spent standing beside a locked transaction.
The timing makes the self-congratulation even more polished. Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy has presented 1,000 days of Congress rule as “good governance”, with welfare, development and social justice displayed as the official pillars. The comparison with the BRS is welcome; every government should be judged against its predecessor. But replacing one party’s achievement festivals with another party’s milestone presentations does not fix a land record. It merely changes the branding on the invitation.
The government says the list is smaller. The land says it is still prohibited. That is the entire 22-A policy in one sentence.
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