1.3 lakh Dharani grievances still pending, farmers vexed

Hyderabad: Despite two special drives since June and several deadlines set by the state govt to district collectors to clear Dharani applications, over 1.30 lakh Dharani applications continue to languish for clearance in the districts with farmers and land owners making rounds to the collectorates and mandal offices seeking solutions to their land-related problems.The state govt may come up with a draft Record of Rights (ROR) Act to find permanent solutions to some of the revenue problems by incorporating various provisions as Dharani web land portal has failed to address the issues.

Among the districts, Rangareddy tops with 28,000 pending applications. While Sangareddy and Vikarabad have more than 10,000 applications pending, Nalgonda, Medchal Malkajgiri, Nagarkurnool and Bhuvanagiri have more than 5,000 grievances pending. In Rangareddy alone, 15,000 data correction problems are pending, and only 3,000 have been cleared.“My application pertaining to the urban land ceiling is pending with the Rangareddy collectorate since Oct 2023 and I have been making rounds to the collectorate in the last four months. But the issue has not been resolved yet,” a land owner, who does not want to be named, told TOI.The govt asked the collectors to conduct a special drive to dispose of pending Dharani applications between June 15-28. Of the over two lakh applications, only 25,000 were cleared. In June last week, a video conference was held with the district collectors to clear pending applications. Meanwhile, another one lakh new applications were filed. Amid allegations that some revenue officials disposed of applications owing to pressure from the collectors, Dharani activist and advocate Gummi Rajkumar Reddy said there is a timeline for the officials to clear the applications.For tahsildars it is seven days, for revenue divisional officers three days, additional collectors three days and district collectors get seven days to clear the applications, but this is never followed. Rajkumar said there is no follow-up action on why the applications are kept pending for several months.“If the state govt wants to stop corruption, the collectors will have to monitor their respective districts and heads of the departments should monitor the collectors’ performance,” Rajkumar said. Last week, Rangareddy additional collector Bhoopal Reddy was caught by ACB sleuths along with a senior assistant while allegedly taking Rs 8 lakh bribe from a real estate developer to remove his 14-gunta land from the prohibitory list. Apart from removal of land from the prohibitory list, issues like data correction such as name corrections, survey numbers, khata merging, succession, pending mutation, court case intimation and urban land ceiling are raised in Dharani portal.
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