Opinion: Telangana's Land Reform A Disaster For The Dispossessed

Land reforms are intended to improve the situation of the poor, but in Telangana, this has not been the case with the government's digital land records updating programme, known as the Dharani portal.

Since its launch in October 2020, over one million people have been waiting for land justice. However, the portal has largely served landed farmers and absent landlords better than the cultivators and poor farmers, reversing decades of victories for the Telangana people due to bias in the conceptualization and implementation of the programme.

Although hopes were high for the Dharani portal, the revenue department was flooded with numerous complaints in the initial days. Despite this, the Telangana Government pushed through the ill-conceived reform, as controlling land ownership is at the heart of the socio-political struggles in Telangana. This control allows the ruling BRS to control the crucial parts of the political and social structure of the state.

Dharani is an integrated land records management system run by the Government's Chief Commissioner of Land Administration. The portal promised total land transparency, comprising modernization of land records, land registration, sorting of survey numbers, updating physical records, online land documents, lists of liabilities, online mutation, market valuation, and most importantly, the issuance of New Pattadar passbook by the Telangana Government under the new Telangana Rights in Land & Pattadar Passbooks Act of 2020 after the completion of Land Records Updation Programme (LRUP, 2017).

However, Dharani records conflicted with previous land records, such as Pahanis and Record of Rights (ROR) documents and old Pattadar passbooks, which were the result of a long line of struggles. Every column and every detail captured and stored in those documents marked the victories of the peasants over the landlords, along with the history of difficult sacrifices that the farmer and tenant communities had to make.

Earlier Pahanis provided a number and location on maps, extent of land and its boundaries, along with type of land and ownership. Subsequently, to provide Record of Rights (ROR) in the lands held by the ryots and to give title deeds, the ROR work was taken up in the State as per ROR Act 1971, as amended in 1980, 1989 and 1993.

However, citizens can now view the ROR online on the Dharani portal but cannot obtain it from the portal itself. Before this, it could be accessed from the Government's Maa Bhoomi web portal, a predecessor to Dharani. Today, for a certified copy, land-owners must go through the public interface section known as Mee Seva. This is an inevitable step as the ROR1B is protection against false claims on lands and can stand in a court of law. This is also critical for ancestral lands, all registrations, for loans, and especially to avail Rythu Bandhu, the much-touted input subsidy for crops.

Field research by the author shows that farmers face several problems obtaining the ROR1B on the Dharani portal, including mismatch between or absence of survey numbers and the name of the owner, lack of the chain of ownership, inaccurate extent of land, mistaken classification of land, and other issues.

Land-owning farmers who may not have the new ROR1B in their name often possess the 'old passbook' issued before Dharani. These are not recognized anymore unless the landowner's name appears on the Dharani portal. To resolve this, landowners run around revenue offices and Mee Seva centres, often facing physical hardships and misconduct by officials. The citizens also realize that their efforts are unnecessary; the so-called 'corrections' in the ROR are for mistakes that never existed in the first place.

Two examples illustrate this. Firstly, the Telangana High Court intervened in July 2022, in the case of a small and marginal farmer whose land was wrongfully added to the list of Prohibited Land. This case took place in the Chief Minister's own assembly constituency of Gajwel in Siddipet district. Secondly, the Telangana High Court pulled up the district administration for deleting the names of 76 tribal farmers after they received Dharani passbooks. They even stopped receiving Rythu Bandhu after their names mysteriously disappeared from the Dharani portal.

Problems emerging from the Dharani portal in Telangana have most affected small and marginal farmers, farmers with government-assigned lands, tribals, and cultivators without formal ownership documents. These citizens belong to SCs, STs, OBCs, and some of the most depressed sections of society. The Telangana Government has deprived lakhs of such citizens of land rights, perhaps because those in power often forget that even the dispossessed have an equal voice and an equal vote in a democracy.

(Dr Kota Neelima is political scientist, author and general-secretary, Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.