The Revenue Department has embarked upon a massive exercise of “purification of land records” to rectify the lapses if any in the existing records to avoid scope for irregularities in the land transactions.
The department had decided to take up rectification as it was found that there was no proper record of assignment lands in over 10,000 villages across the State. The situation was no different in respect of surplus lands under urban land ceiling, evacuee properties and wakf lands in some pockets in the urban areas.
One of the main reasons which prompted the department to initiate the purification exercise, according to senior officials, is the continuance of the pahanis and other basic records in the name of the dead. Coupled with this was the department’s inability to update details of mutations as the occupants/buyers had not submitted the details to the officials concerned.
Absence of updated records had made it difficult to prepare the prohibitory properties record as mandated under Section 22 (a) of the Registration Act. The Government would be in a position to stop transactions relating to prohibitory properties once the record is prepared and steps had been initiated simultaneously to effectively link the websites of the Revenue and Registration departments.
Interlinking of the websites of the two departments would ensure that the officials concerned are alerted the moment any transaction pertaining to lands in prohibitory records is registered. “There are instances where people obtained fake registration documents and furnished them to secure loans from banks. This in turn can result in loss to the Government,” a senior official said.
Verification process
The exercise was aimed at identifying the extent of Government lands like owned by the revenue department, endowment lands, evacuee properties as well as wakf lands. The officials from the level of tahsildar had been asked to verify the existing records and ascertain whether the occupants were genuine beneficiaries through the gram sabhas.
Preparation of sub division records would be possible after the completion of the verification process and the officials concerned had also been instructed to enter details of lands in litigation on the official website.
The department had decided to conduct awareness programmes for village revenue officers, tahsildars, deputy collectors and others on the finer aspects relating to the maintenance of records. The training programme would be held at Dr. Marri Channa Reddy Human Resource Development Institute here from Thursday.