Hyderabad: The Telangana high court has allowed the state government to clear all cases involving the issue of registering agricultural lands of about nine lakh small and marginal farmers who had purchased their holdings from sellers by entering into agreements on sada bainama (plain papers) or bond papers.

A division bench comprising chief justice Aparesh Kumar Singh and Justice G.M. Mohiuddin on Tuesday (August 26) lifted an interim order issued in 2020 which barred registration or mutation of about 10 lakh acres of land in villages that were purchased by farmers solely by the word of mouth of sellers, who lacked any documentation or records to support it.

These 10 lakh acres were part of an overall 18 lakh acres of disputed lands in Telangana, included in Part 'B' of a new Record of Rights (RoR) created by the government when it introduced Dharani portal, a digital land records management system, in 2020. Part B of RoR 2020 is the prohibited list of land parcels classified as disputed land between two parties.

The issue dates back to a government order by the previous Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) regime on October 18, 2020, that implemented the second phase of a programme to regularise lands transacted by sada bainama and create a record for them since they were unrecorded in government database.

Initially, the government received 2.26 lakh applications till its deadline, October 30, but on extension till November 10, it got another 6.74 lakh applications, totalling to nine lakh applications. In the meantime, the government replaced the RoR of 2016 with a fresh RoR of 2020 to make it compatible with Dharani portal, a new lands management system that was launched on the occasion of Dussehra on October 25.

However, the new RoR did not have any provision to make corrections in land records on Dharani portal. As a result, they were included in Part B, pending corrections through court orders.

In the first phase of regularising the sada bainama transactions under RoR of 2016, which followed the Telangana Rights in Land and Pattadar Passbooks Act, 1971, the government issued proceedings under Section 13(b), which deals with the issue of a certificate validating unregistered documents, and handed over passbooks with fee exemption to 6.18 lakh farmers out of 12.64 lakh applications.

Almost half the applications were rejected after a thorough scrutiny. The government implemented it as a prestigious programme to address land issues that were unresolved till the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh and statehood to Telangana on June 2, 2014.

The BRS (then called Telangana Rashtra Samiti) government, led by Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, took the programme as a matter of prestige because its welfare programmes like input subsidy to poor and small farmers with holdings of half acre to two acres could not be executed if their holdings were not recorded post-purchases. The original owners continued to be the title holders on record.

It was found that sada bainama was an age-old practice, recognised under the Telangana Rights in Land and Pattadar Passbooks Act, 1971, and considered a unique legislation for such purposes. There were no hassles in registration of such lands till 1989. A debate in the assembly of combined Andhra Pradesh in 1989 led to inserting a new provision – Section 5 – in the Act that mandated taking up ‘jamabandi’ (land record) to verify undocumented lands.

Jamabandi was a crucial land revenue record that served as a legal record of rights detailing land ownership, cultivation history and tenancy information for specific land parcels.

Section 5 of the Telangana Rights in Land and Pattadar Passbooks Act required tehsildars to visit villages and record land transactions every year. The practice went on smoothly from 1989 to 2016, even when the then TRS government amended the RoR for the first time.

The second amendment of the RoR in 2020 to integrate it with Dharani portal, the 13(b) proceedings could be issued only to the documented lands in the portal.

In this background, Shinde Devidas, a farmer from Nirmal, a town in erstwhile Adilabad district, filed a public interest litigation in the high court challenging the move to regularise land during the second phase. The petitioner argued that there was no chance of regularisation with Dharani in place and after the enactment of second RoR. He questioned the invitation for new applications.

The court also took objection to the government receiving applications for regularisation of sada bainama lands and issued an interim order stopping all of them.

After the BRS lost the elections in December 2023, the Congress government promised to undo all the negative issues inherent in Dharani.

 A year-long study of Dharani by a committee headed by a retired IAS officer Raymond Peter resulted in the government bringing in Bhubharati portal, a renewed version of land records management, through another legislation which assumed the role of RoR 2025.

The Bhubharati portal had a module to make corrections, unlike in Dharani. The portal was also simplified to incorporate only six modules against 33 in Dharani.

A provision in Bhubharati (Section 6) enabled the government to allow all sada bainama transactions of farmers who purchased lands prior to June 2014 and having them in their possession for 12 years thereafter. The government designated the revenue divisional officer as the inquiry officer.

The 12-year timeframe was permitted by court only for lands of the second phase as they were bracketed with RoR 2016 and had no controversy. Fresh applications for registration were not entertained since the old legislation had ceased to operate. This paved the way for clearing 9 lakh applications seeking land titles to 10 lakh acres mostly in interior villages where land values were low and in possession of poor farmers who could neither afford to pay the registration and mutation fee nor approach courts to seek legal redress.

Panchayatraj Minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy hailed the court judgement as historic and said the government was all set to realise the dreams of lakhs of farmers who were ditched by the previous government.

He criticised the introduction of Dharani without finding a solution to the lands listed in Part B of the 1971 Act. The government studied best practices in 18 states before taking a decision on Bhubharati.

An expert in land laws, M. Sunil Kumar, who is also a member of farmers commission set up by Telangana government, told The Wire that the land records updation programme in 2016 disclosed lakhs of sada bainama transactions left over from the first phase. Hence, the the second phase was necessary.

V. Latchi Reddy and Ramakrishna, president and general secretary, respectively, of Telangana Deputy Collectors Association, said that most of the land disputes in the state will be resolved when the regularisation of said bainama lands was completed.

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