The Government Solved 22-A, Except For Landowners

The Congress government promised Bhu Bharati as a clean break from Telangana’s land-records disorder. It has instead produced the administrative equivalent of a locked door with an excellent user manual: your land may be private, your papers may be valid, and your transaction may still be prohibited under Section 22-A. Revenue Minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy apologised for the hardship, then moved briskly to the more comfortable position that the mess is a “legacy issue”. The landowner gets the apology. The previous government gets the blame. The portal keeps the property.

The numbers are where the rescue operation becomes performance art. Ponguleti told the Assembly that the total area under Section 22-A fell from 1,02,52,690 acres when Congress took office to 1,02,05,250 acres by August 2026 — a reduction of about 47,440 acres. Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy offered another victory calculation: disputed private patta land had declined from 7.91 lakh acres in 2020 to 3.73 lakh acres in 2026. Somewhere in government communications, a spreadsheet is being garlanded.

This is the new governing formula: acknowledge the citizen’s problem, redefine its category, announce movement in the aggregate and promise a “permanent solution” without publishing when the permanent part begins. The affected private agricultural land in the government’s August figure is still 3,73,980 acres. That is not a typo in a footnote; it is a large population of immobilised ownership. But the official achievement is that the list is smaller than it might have been, which should be reassuring to anyone who has no immediate need to sell, mortgage or register their property.

K T Rama Rao and T Harish Rao are demanding a judicial probe, giving the opposition an opportunity to discover that land records deserve accuracy even when the previous administration’s record is under examination. Their criticism should be tested against documents, not slogans. The government’s own figures already provide enough material. Bhu Bharati was sold as simplification. Its first great simplification was reducing a live land crisis to a quarrel over which baseline looks nicer.

The land remains blocked; only the statistics have been released.