The State government has decided to conduct a special drive for survey settlement across Telangana to cleanse land records and make public the ownership of every piece of land.
At a review meeting held with senior officials of the revenue and other departments, the Chief Minister asked the officials to draw an action plan to implement survey settlement with village as a unit and launch the survey as early as possible. Chief Advisor to Government Rajiv Sharma, Chief Secretary S.P. Singh, senior officials S. Narsing Rao, B.R. Meena, Jayesh Ranjan, A. Shanti Kumari, G.D. Priyadarshini, Nadeem Ahmed, Smita Sabharwal, and Rangareddy Collector M. Raghunandan Rao, among others, attended.
Several decisions were taken at the meeting that went on for about seven hours. The Chief Minister stated that except during the Nizam’s rule in 1936, land records were never scrutinised or filtered leading to present-day disputes and difficulties. The land disputes were also becoming law and order problem sometimes and to put an end to it, survey of the entire land was necessary, he noted. He suggested that the Revenue Department take the help of the Survey of India and other agencies in the country for the purpose. The land data collected by the Agriculture Department recently for the purpose of giving ₹4,000 per acre per crop as input assistance to farmers from the next year was not matching with the revenue records, the Chief Minister pointed out, adding that the number of farmers in a particular village was 1,100 as per revenue records but the agriculture survey had shown it as only 300.
“Giving input assistance under such circumstances is difficult and it can also lead to large-scale corruption besides getting bad name to the government,” the Chief Minister said. He wanted the officials to get clarity on the entire land of 2.7 crore acres in the State along with classification of lands.
Stating that the land would neither increase nor decrease, the Chief Minister said rectifying land records from the village level was necessary for all present and future needs. He told the officials to conduct the survey for 15 days in all the 10,850 revenue villages by deputing 3,500 revenue officers.
Frmers should be issued with new pattadar passbooks along with a unique identity number for every piece of land once the rectification of land records was over, the Chief Minister directed the officials.
