Telangana’s Land Crisis Has Found Its Missing Owner

The Congress government has discovered a novel form of land administration: the property cannot move, but the blame can. Telangana’s Section 22-A crisis has left citizens staring at blocked registrations while the government conducts a brisk relay race of responsibility. Revenue Minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy first apologised and blamed officials. Then the previous BRS government became the culprit. Congress state president B Mahesh Kumar Goud supplied the third leg of the relay by blaming employees. At this rate, the next explanation will be that the land itself failed to attend the review meeting.

Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy promised a “permanent solution” and announced a high-powered committee covering 12 categories of disputes. That is reassuring in the same way a new committee is reassuring when your house is on fire: somebody has located a table. The promise came without immediate relief or a clear deadline for people whose land remains trapped in the prohibited list. The government has therefore produced land that is politically available, legally unavailable and administratively nobody’s responsibility.

The numbers are now doing political service. Revanth cited reductions in disputed private patta land and Part-B land. Ponguleti cited a different overall decline between December 2023 and August 2026, along with higher registration revenue. Fine. Numbers can show movement in a file. They do not, by themselves, tell a landowner when the frozen transaction will be released. A government can celebrate a better spreadsheet while a citizen remains unable to sell, mortgage or register property. That is not resolution. It is self-congratulation with columns.

And when the Assembly could have been used to explain the remedy, Revanth turned to alleged land irregularities involving K Chandrashekar Rao’s farmhouse and claims of wrongdoing worth ₹1 lakh crore. Those allegations require proper inquiry, not political arithmetic. But investigating the previous government does not unfreeze the present one’s citizens. A farmhouse can wait for a probe. A family’s legally usable property cannot be asked to wait indefinitely while ministers decide which decade should receive the blame.

This is not administration. It is blame-management dressed as governance. In Telangana, the land is prohibited, the explanation is conditional and the government’s responsibility is missing from the records.