Adilabad: How faulty Dharani land record system has sparked anger among rural voters against BRS?

Adilabad: Dharani land record system is one of the major issues that rural voters in Telangana are using to corner the BRS. The system is under the cloud given the large-scale discrepancies.

The prevailing anger among poor farmers threatens to cost the ruling party precious votes in these elections going by the mood of voters.

Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao himself broached the subject in some of his public meetings based on the feedback he received about the irritants in the system.

Curiously, the roots of the Integrated Land Management System are embedded in a now-waned social irritant,naxal violence, to be precise in the first major incident in Telangana on 7 November 1976.

While extremists call the incident as Thapalpur raid, it is more commonly known as the Thapalpur murders in which the landlord of Thapalpur (now located in Jannaram mandal of Mancherial district) G.V. Pithambar Rao, his family, and workers were targetted. Seven persons including two sons of the landlord who was a one-time MLA were killed by a band of CPI (ML) Naxalites led by Kondapalli Seetharamaiah on this day 48 years ago.

This was the first incident of its kind aimed at finishing the alleged tyranny of landlords in the old districts of Adilabad and Karimnagar which evolved into the Jagityal Peasant Movement of 1978. The violence unleashed by left-wing extremists during that period triggered an exodus of the landlords, the incident itself is described in some detail by journalist Rahul Pandita in his book Hello Bastar.

Until their migration, the landlords had depended only on the moderate incomes generated through agriculture. Among the occupations in which they tried their luck was realty and industry and it resulted in increased prosperity for many of the migrants.

"In the meanwhile, extremism declined and simultaneously the value of lands which the landlords once tilled was experiencing quantum appreciation. The landlords still held the title on abandoned lands but they did not have pattadar passbooks as mandated by the 1989 and subsequent amendments to the Record of Rights (RoR) Act 1971 which made their efforts to reclaim the extents futile," pointed out a retired Revenue department officer as he began explaining the nitty gritty of the Dharani system.

The lands that were seized by extremists following the violence they had unleashed were distributed among poor farmers by the Naxalites. The 'beneficiaries' tilled these lands for durations that were sufficient to make them eligible for acquiring titles, according to the retired official.

"The Dharani system envisaged the restoration of rights on these abandoned lands to landlords based on the half-century-old titles they held. The new system did away with the column which mentioned the name of the tenant farmers or those who were in cultivation," said Jannaram businessman Pokala Suresh as he talked about the rationale behind the move to introduce the Dharani system.

"There is a lot of antipathy towards this government among poor farmers who have been deprived of their rights thanks to the new system of land records management. There is an urgent need for correctional steps to be taken if the BRS intends to placate the woebegone farmer-voters," asserted a villager exhibiting a rarely seen finality in his voice.