Telangana Govt actively considering issuance of Bhudhar cards for agriculture and non-agricultural land holdings in rural areas

Telangana Government considering issuance of Bhudhar cards for land holdings, aiming to prevent frauds and streamline land records.

Telangana Government is actively considering issuance of Bhudhar cards specifying the agriculture and non-agricultural land holdings of people in the rural areas.

The Government is working out modalities to make Bhudhar number mandatory, on the lines of the Aadhar cards issued by UIDAI, for all land transactions in the coming days to ensure that there is no scope for frauds. The system is being looked as convergence of information in all land records in one place.

To begin with, proposals are underway to issue temporary Bhudhar cards based on the existing land records available with the Revenue department. “This will be another land records purification process,” land laws expert and Nalsar adjunct professor M. Sunil Kumar who is associated with the preparation of the new Record of Rights Act, told The Hindu.

He recalled a similar exercise undertaken by the Dr. Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy Government in the united Andhra Pradesh which led to assigning unique barcode to pattadar passbooks of farmers verifying the land records at the village level. “Introduction of Dharani portal however led to several discrepancies like landholders not finding their name in their genuine landholdings and mismatches in the records,” he said adding these oddities would be purified with the issuance of the Bhudhar cards.

The issue of permanent Bhudhar cards will be taken up after resurvey of lands across the State. Except for customary resurvey once every forty years, there is no legal binding on the Government to conduct resurvey of lands. The Government has included the provision for issue of permanent Bhudhar cards after geo-referencing, incorporating latitude and longitude for exact location, of the parcels revealing its intent of taking up resurvey of lands in the due course.

The proposed RoR Act, put in public domain for eliciting the views of stakeholders, also has the provision for preparation of separate record of rights for abadi (non-agricultural) lands. This is in line with the Central Government’s decision to provide Unique Land Parcel Identification Number to all landholdings and SWAMITVA scheme aimed at providing rural people with the right to document their residential properties so that they could use their property for economic purposes. Joining the scheme was likely to ensure release of around ₹1,200 crore by the Centre for taking up identification of agriculture and non-agricultural land holdings.