New Act in Assembly soon to replace Dharani with Bhumatha portal

Hyderabad: The state government is planning to bring Bhumatha portal in the place of Dharani soon. It is making efforts to introduce a Bill in the upcoming session of the Legislative Assembly to amend the Telangana RoR Act (Right of Records) to facilitate the introduction of the Bhumatha portal, official sources said.

Revenue tribunals will be set up in all districts to resolve land issues as part of the new Act.

The previous BRS government brought the Dharani portal by amending the RoR Act in 2020. Dharani was created to serve as a digital platform for land records and maintained for the purposes of Record of Rights (RoR).

However, Dharani was mired in controversies ever since it was launched. Complaints and grievances poured against the Dharani portal in all the districts as there were large-scale errors in digital land records and there was no provision for people to seek corrections.

Moreover, the BRS government abolished the powers of RDOs and MROs in correcting the land records and accorded all powers to only district collectors. The district collectors received thousands of applications for Dharani corrections every week but they kept them pending citing 'work overload' and busy with their regular duties. Lakhs of Dharani applications remained pending for over three years causing severe hardships to landowners.

The Congress in its manifesto for the Assembly elections promised to scrap the Dharani portal and bring the Bhumatha portal in its place. It constituted a committee to study the loopholes in the Dharani portal and suggest measures to devise a people-friendly portal in its place. The committee made several recommendations to bring a better portal than Dharani.

The BRS government also abolished Revenue Courts in all districts, which served as a platform to resolve land disputes. With this, people were forced to approach civil courts which took a long time for resolution.

Through the new Act, the Congress government is planning to set up revenue tribunals in all districts to resolve land issues.