The decision of the State government to resume village revenue records from Village Revenue Officers, thereby diluting the VRO administration, brings into sharp focus the chequered history of the village revenue system after it took roots during NTR regime following the abolition of hereditary Patel - Patwari system in the combined State.
With the fall of Patwaris who looked after revenue administration in villages till 1985, came Village Assistants who numbered about 4,500 in 1986. They continued in the post on pay scales fixed by the government and each of them looked after five to six villages. There were two or three Village Assistants for each mandal. Based on a Supreme Court order subsequently, the Village Assistants were sidelined as office staff and full fledged Village Administrative Officers (VAOs) on an honorarium of ₹ 750 per month were appointed in 1992. Parallelly, a separate stream of Village Development Officers (VDOs) who served the interests of Panchayat Raj administration was created.
The services of VAOs who numbered about 15,500 and VDOs were merged, and, all together 18,500 of them were appointed with pay scales as Panchayat Secretaries by N. Chandrababu Naidu government on January 1, 2002. It was not only VDOs but people appointed on compassionate grounds and those from other departments joined as Panchayat Secretaries, said Garike Upendra Rao, President, Telangana VROs welfare association. It was the Panchayat Secretaries who enjoyed complete sway on village accounts which initially numbered 44 but gradually pruned to 11 by 1996. The services of Panchayat Secretaries were withdrawn from revenue administration and they were confined to Panchayat Raj departmental works when the Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy government undertook a major recruitment of VROs exclusively to handle the eleven types of village land records. About 7,000 of them were recruited in entire Andhra Pradesh in February 2007. Presently, the VROs did only one out of eleven functions in their job chart, that is, maintaining Pahani in Village Account No. 3. The other ten functions remained on paper, according to land laws expert and an Adjunct Professor at NALSAR University of Law N. Suneel Kumar.
He said the VROs wrote the Pahanis manually till 2010 but they were left to merely assist Tahsildars, revenue inspectors or revenue officers in inquiries over land disputes after computerisation of records and online data entry by computer operators with biometric authentication by Tehsildars, Mr. Suneel Kumar said. He added that the withdrawal of VROs would create a vacuum in land governance at village level because they were the points men for the job.
The VROs welfare association State secretary H. Sudhakar Rao said the VROs only had in their possession computer printouts of Pahanis which they handed over to the government today on its instructions. The printouts were taken by them with their own expenses.
