Regularisation of Section 22A lands in Telangana trudges slowly

Land laws experts said that Telangana government or high-level committee have not shown any way out for regularising genuine lands declared as prohibited under Section 22A. The image is used for representative purposes only.

Rectification of lapses that occurred in the declaration of lands under Section 22A of the Registration Act and their regularisation in Telangana is moving at a snail’s pace.

The process reportedly slowed down as some district collectors are learnt to have submitted the lists of Section 22A lands under their purview in pdf format and the same have been uploaded on Registration and Stamps website. Since scanned documents with village as unit have been uploaded on the website, changes/corrections in the date can be made only after reopening the entire document.

Given the workload on the Revenue staff and technical problems in the website which are not infrequent, effecting changes/corrections is taking time putting the owners to difficulties, thereby resulting in delays in the transactions. The development follows the furore raised by people over thousands of genuine private properties , residential plots, and older homes across Hyderabad and surrounding districts like Rangareddy, Medchal, and Sangareddy being mistakenly flagged and placed on the prohibited list due to clerical errors, technical issues, and legacy data issues from earlier portal transitions.

While the Opposition parties — the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) in particular — alleged that huge tracts of land had been placed under the prohibited list, the government claimed that 3.73 lakh acres lands were in prohibited list currently as the government had taken steps to regularise over 4 lakh acres in the past couple of years.

Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy has announced constitution of a high-level official committee to study the issue in-depth and suggest remedial measures so that not a single genuine land owner is adversely affected with one month deadline for submission of its recommendations. The committee, according to one of its members, has made several recommendations based on which the Revenue department had issued certain circulars/memos in the recent days. These included orders like G.O. 59 for speedy clearance of pending applications including those pertaining to the Urban Land Ceiling Act.

Legal experts are however finding fault with the process adopted claiming that the government or the committee have not shown any way out for regularising genuine lands declared as prohibited under Section 22A. “The recent circulars and memos deal with disposal of pending applications. There are no specific guidelines issued relating to lands erroneously placed under prohibited list,” a land laws expert said.