Telangana’s Land Crisis Gets a Political Address Change

The Congress government has discovered the perfect solution to Telangana’s 22-A land-list mess: divide one administrative crisis into two political calendars. For land allegedly linked to former chief minister K Chandrashekhar Rao’s family, Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy has ordered a 30-day survey and an inquiry into alleged irregularities around the farmhouse. For private owners whose land remains frozen, the state has offered a committee, a grievance process and the soothing assurance that a permanent solution is coming. The calendar for that solution remains classified.

This is not quite governance. It is governance with a fast lane for opponents and a waiting room for citizens. Revanth’s earlier assurance was that “no land will be lost” if property was wrongly included in the prohibited list. That is welcome. But land that cannot be sold, mortgaged or properly recorded is already performing a convincing imitation of lost property. The Bhu Bharati portal itself acknowledges that an entire survey number can be marked as acquired when only part of it was acquired. The state has built a correction mechanism for the error, then appears surprised that people would like the correction.

Revenue Minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy calls 22-A a “legacy issue” and says the list had reduced by August 30 to 1,02,05,250 acres, including 3,73,980 acres classified as private land. The BRS offers a much larger political number, with T Harish Rao alleging that around 15 lakh acres were placed in the prohibited category. Those competing figures require verification, not devotional chanting from either side. But the government’s own figures establish the central point: hundreds of thousands of acres classified as private land are not a historical footnote. They are people’s property trapped in the state’s paperwork.

Revanth is entitled to investigate KCR’s landholdings. He is not entitled to confuse investigation with delivery. The Congress came to power promising a different administration, not a more energetic version of the old habit in which every present failure is sent backwards to the previous government for excavation. The political archaeology can continue. The landowners need their records corrected first.

For KCR’s family, the government supplied a deadline. For Telangana’s landowners, it supplied another reason to wait.