Amid mushrooming buildings, Telangana Govt to check land data for sop
Hyderabad: Revenue records will be updated across the state prior to the implementation of Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao’s scheme, announced on Friday, of extending financial assistance to farmers of Rs 8,000 per acre per year. This is because a significant chunk of agricultural land has been put to non-agricultural use in districts due to the realty boom over the years. Revenue records continue to show them as agriculture land.
Mr Rao wants the benefit to reach farmers who are carrying out agriculture. To achieve this, the government will take up a year-long exercise to identify farm land and exclude non-agricultural land from the purview of the scheme. The conversion of agricultural lands for non-agricultural purposes is higher in villages surrounding cities, towns and district headquarters.
With the creation of 21 districts last October, the villages surrounding the new district headquarters witnessed a real estate boom. Illegal ventures have come up on farmlands in these villages. With no system in place in new districts to seek approvals from various government agencies for land conversions like in the case of GHMC and HMDA limits, the farmland was easily converted for non-agriculture use to cash in on the realty boom.
Revenue minister Mohd Mahmood Ali said, “For this reason, the government planned the implementation of the scheme from next year so that we can use the time to update revenue records and identify genuine farmland. The CM wants genuine farmers who do farming to benefit. Orders have been issued to collectors and revenue officials to start the process at the earliest with a target to complete the exercise by this December-end.”
The government will upload the list of eligible farmland on the website and seek suggestions/ objections if any. “We will modify the list if the suggestions/ objections are found to be genuine, by taking up ground-level verification. A final list will be uploaded, which will enable those on it to be eligible to avail of the scheme,” he added. Mr Rao said the amo-unt will be credited in the accounts of farmers on whose name the farm land is registered based on pattadar passbooks.
