Several property owners in Telangana are facing a strange situation: they possess valid documents for their land, but government records prevent them from selling, transferring or even fully exercising their ownership rights.
The problem is largely linked to errors and classifications carried forward from the previous Dharani land-record system into the new Bhu Bharati framework.
In many cases, privately owned patta lands were reportedly marked as government land, assigned land or placed under prohibited categories. Once a survey number is flagged in such a manner, transactions involving the property can be blocked.
As a result, owners may possess registered sale deeds, pattadar passbooks and other documents but still find themselves unable to sell, mortgage, gift or transfer their property.
The issue became one of the major complaints against the Dharani system introduced by the previous BRS government.
After coming to power, the Congress government replaced Dharani with Bhu Bharati, promising a more transparent system and better grievance redressal for landowners. The government has said Bhu Bharati was designed to address several categories of land-record disputes that could not easily be corrected under Dharani.
However, one major challenge remains: old data and disputed classifications do not automatically disappear merely because a new portal has been introduced.
Property owners whose lands continue to carry incorrect entries must approach the authorities and seek correction through the procedures available under Bhu Bharati.
The new system provides options for correcting the name of a pattadar, land classification, extent, missing survey numbers and properties wrongly recorded as government or assigned land.
For example, if private patta land is wrongly shown as assigned land, an owner can seek modification of the land classification.
Similarly, if a property is incorrectly recorded under a government khata, the owner can apply for its transfer to a private patta record, subject to verification by the authorities.
But for affected families, the problem is more than a technical error.
A landowner may have purchased property years ago, paid registration charges and maintained documents in his or her name, only to discover later that the property cannot be transacted because of an entry in the digital land database.
Such cases can affect farmers as well as urban and semi-urban landowners. Property sales can collapse, bank loans may become difficult and family partitions or inheritance transfers can get delayed until the records are corrected.
The Telangana government maintains that Bhu Bharati provides more avenues for resolving such disputes than Dharani and gives revenue officials greater authority to examine claims and rectify genuine errors.
Still, the experience of affected property owners highlights a larger problem in digitising land records: when incorrect historical data enters a government database, an owner can effectively become “locked out” of his own property until the mistake is formally corrected.
For Telangana, the success of Bhu Bharati may therefore depend not merely on creating a new digital platform, but on how quickly and fairly the government resolves thousands of legacy land disputes inherited from the previous system.
