Telangana to bring reforms in revenue administration to make it transparent, people-friendly  

Telangana Government initiates reforms in revenue administration, seeking public feedback on new Record of Rights Bill 2024.

The Telangana State Government has started a comprehensive action to bring in reforms in the revenue administration to make it transparent and people-friendly.

The first step in this direction is to keep the draft of the new Telangana Record of Rights Bill 2024 in the public domain for 20 days seeking views of the stakeholders’ right from farmers on the rectifications and scope for the introduction of new provisions in the proposed Bill before tabling it in the Legislature.

This forms part of the State Government’s three-pronged strategy for streamlining revenue administration in the coming days which comprises a change in laws, administrative reforms in the Department and education and empowerment of farmers at the grassroot level.

Accordingly, the Government is planning to bring significant change in laws with a view to bringing all the 124 revenue acts under one umbrella through a comprehensive “Revenue Law”. This will be followed by administrative reforms envisaging the presence of a revenue person in every village or cluster of villages depending on their size.

Revenue administration at the village level suffered a setback following the abolition of certain categories of posts by the previous Government as a result of which people were made to approach the district Collector or the Chief Commissioner of Land Administration for resolution of their problems resulting in huge pendency of cases.

“There is a sort of vacuum in revenue administration at the village level and efforts are under way to fill it,” a legal expert connected with the matter told The Hindu. According to him, keeping the draft Bill in the public domain is the first of its kind initiative in the recent decades for eliciting views from stakeholders.

The draft explains features such as rectification of digital land records with an intent to have statutory backing and provision for adjudication of part-B cases. The Bill paves the way for the enactment of the new Record-of-Rights (RoR) Act after a re-survey before which the record prepared under the 1971 Act and maintained in the 2020 Act will be deemed to be the RoR under the new Act.