LAND PROBLEMS IN TELANGANA STATE 1. Landlessness: Various studies suggest that about fifty percent of rural households in Telangana are landless. This means that about 25 lakh rural households have no land to cultivate. Majority of them belong to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and other marginalized groups. 2. Homelessness: It’s estimated that about 6 lakh rural households in Telangana are both landless and houseless. They could not even take the benefits under rural housing programmes as they do not have land to build their houses. 3. Insecure land rights: At least forty percent of farmers (about 20 lakh households) have insecure, undocumented or inadequately documented land rights in Telangana. 4. Land Records: Majority of entries in all the land records do not reflect the field reality. Many times, names of the pattadars and cultivators are not entered in revenue records. Further, there are many errors / mistakes / discrepancies in the revenue records. People are facing many hardships due to non-update land records. They are being deprived of many benefits due to them as farmers. 5. Survey: The major bottleneck in resolving any land problem and the root cause for many land problems is the lack of proper survey and survey records. Law requires that re-survey should be done after every 30 years but the last survey in Telangana was done in 1940’s. Most of the survey records (village maps and tippans) are in brittle condition. 6. Land Administration: Revenue department which deals with land administration has neither the time nor the required capacities for administering land. There is acute shortage of revenue staff at all levels. Thousands of land petitions are pending in various revenue offices. 7. Land Problems/Disputes: There are at least 100 to 200 land problems in every village. About 12 lakh land problems were brought to the notice of revenue authorities just in the last one year. It is estimated that about 2% of land in rural areas is in court cases and about 40% of land is in other problems. The poor are unable to get their land problems resolved because they lack legal awareness, cannot obtain legal aid services and cannot access adjudicating systems. 8. Land Alienation: Significant percentage of land assigned to the landless poor is alienated. Five lakh acres of assigned land is alienated as per Government estimates and as per the estimates of civil society organisations it is about 25 lakh acres. In spite of the stringent Land Transfer Regulations prohibiting transfer of lands tonon-tribal in Scheduled Areas, tens of thousands of acres of land have been illegally passed into the hands of the non tribals. Non-tribal population holds as much as 51 percent of the lands in the scheduled areas and more and more lands are going in to the hands of non-tribal. An assessment of the cases disposed of by the LTR authorities in the agency areas of Telangana shows that more than 50% of the cases have gone in favor of the non-tribals. Out of 45,595 cases booked under LTR (1, 86, 664 acres), land is restored (at least on paper) in only 15, 556 cases (71, 273 acres). 9. Tenants: As per Government estimates, there are about 4 lakh tenant farmers in Telangana. Out of them, about 2 lakh tenant farmers have received Loan Eligibility Cards until now (which are valid only for one year). And, majority of the tenants who have received the Loan Eligibility Cards did not get crop loans.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 07:19:51 +0000
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