Telangana to club small farmers’ land

Hyderabad: The state government is all set to offer a novel scheme “Adal-Badal” to farmers with small landholdings in different locations to club them through mutual exchange of land with other farmers for a larger landholding.

No registration charges will be collected from the farmers for this. Enquiries revealed that one of the reasons behind the high suicide rate among farmers was that a majority of farmers have small landholdings.

This makes agriculture unviable and farmers are forced to depend on private moneylenders for loans at higher rates of interest loans since banks refuse loans for small landholdings.

Under the scheme, farmers can mutually transfer their small landholdings in different locations to one another for free.

The scheme is being devised in accordance with the recent announcement by Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao in the Assembly.

“Under the scheme, farmers with land can exchange land with adjacent landowner and vice-versa and make it a big landholding. The government will not collect any registration charges for this,” Mr Rao said.

As per the data available with agriculture department, TS has a total of 55.54 lakh landholdings, of which 47.68 lakh are small landholdings, a whopping 85 per cent.

The state’s average landholding stands at just 1.11 hectares. About 13.27 lakh landholdings range from just one hectare to two hectares.

Officials said that the scheme would be voluntary. The government plans to create awareness on the adverse affects of small landholdings and benefits of having big landholdings, before announcing the scheme.

Officials expect a significant number of farmers to avail the opportunity since registration would be done free of cost.