A home in Kukatpally. A registered sale deed going back to 1989. A bank mortgage taken years ago and formally released in 2017, leaving nothing owed. On paper, the title chain is complete and clean, the kind you would happily buy into.
And yet the survey number it sits on shows up on the state’s prohibited list, under the court-case register.
Both things are true at once. That contradiction is the whole story of what is happening in Telangana right now, and it is worth understanding before you buy, sell, or mortgage any property in the state.
What Section 22A actually is
Section 22A of the Registration Act, 1908, as adopted in Telangana, is a short provision with a large effect. It lets the state government notify certain categories of land as prohibited from registration.
Think of it as a locked drawer at the Sub-Registrar’s office. If your survey number is inside that drawer, the registering officer cannot process a sale deed, a gift deed, a partition, or a mortgage on it, no matter how good your papers look. The refusal is not a judgment call. The law removes the officer’s discretion entirely.
The categories the list is meant to hold are specific:
- Government land, owned by the state or centre
- Endowment and Waqf land held by religious or charitable institutions
- Assigned land, given to landless poor families and non-transferable to private buyers
- Ceiling-surplus land taken under the land ceiling laws
- Land under court dispute or attachment
- Anything else the government notifies as against public policy
Read that list and the intent is clearly sound. It stops someone quietly selling temple land, or a plot the government gave to a landless family, or a parcel a court has frozen. The problem is not the idea. The problem is what got swept in alongside it.
Close to a crore acres, and a lot of them are homes
Over the past year the revenue department has rebuilt this list on a scale that is hard to picture. Reporting by The Federal puts nearly 90 lakh acres under the prohibited category. When the department described the revised list, the figure climbed past one crore acres, out of Telangana’s roughly 2.5 crore total.
Here is the arithmetic that should make any owner pause. Pattadar passbooks exist for about 1.53 crore acres. The remaining roughly one crore acres, the land without a clean passbook trail, is what has largely been pushed into the prohibited bucket.
The department’s own breakdown of the revised list runs to around 77 lakh acres of government, assigned, forest, endowment, irrigation, and road land, plus about 18 lakh acres of agricultural land without pattadar passbooks and roughly 3 lakh acres converted from agricultural to non-agricultural use.
That last slice is where ordinary homeowners live. Estimates reported in the Telangana press suggest something in the order of 18 lakh houses and 9 lakh house sites have been caught, unable to be sold or transferred, because of mapping and classification errors rather than any real defect in title.
Affected pockets are not remote villages. They include Banjara Hills, Kukatpally, Nizampet, and Miyapur, some of the most developed and expensive parts of Hyderabad, built on plots that came with HUDA, HMDA, and Housing Board approvals decades ago.
How a clean title still lands on the list
This is the part that confuses people, so it is worth being precise.
The prohibited list works at the level of the survey number, not the individual plot or door number. A single large survey number might have been government land, or ceiling-surplus land, or under some old dispute at some point in its history. When it was flagged, everything sitting on that survey number inherited the flag, including plots that were carved out, approved, registered, and lived in for thirty years.
So the two facts from that Kukatpally home stop contradicting each other. The registered title chain describes one specific plot and its owners over time. The 22A entry describes the survey number the plot belongs to, and the register that survey number was added to. A clean chain of sale deeds does not clear a survey-number-level flag. They are answering different questions.
Officials have been candid about how this happened. A retired chief commissioner quoted by The Federal put it plainly: “the mechanical implementation of government orders has resulted in private properties being included in the prohibited list.” The bulk-flagging traces back to the 2017-18 Land Records Updation Programme and the 2020 rollout of the Dharani portal, when survey numbers were added against old High Court directions and government orders without checking parcel by parcel.
If you want the fuller story of how Telangana’s records moved from Dharani to the current Bhu Bharati system, we have covered the transition and what changed for owners separately.
Why a 22A flag hurts more than it looks
An entry on the prohibited list is not a fine you pay and move past. It quietly locks the property out of the two things that give it liquidity.
You cannot register a transfer. No sale, no gift, no partition, no settlement gets past the Sub-Registrar while the flag stands. Thousands of owners across the state have found this out at the worst possible moment, sitting at the registration counter with a buyer, money already exchanged, only to have the document refused.
And you cannot mortgage it. Banks treat a 22A parcel as non-marketable title and decline the loan. So the property cannot be sold and cannot be borrowed against. For a family whose main asset is that one house, it is frozen capital.
This sits inside a much larger pattern of Indian property being tied up not by fraud but by paperwork and process, which we mapped in our look at the wider property dispute crisis.
Before you buy: check the list, not just the deeds
The lesson for buyers is uncomfortable but simple. A verified title chain is necessary and no longer sufficient. You have to check the survey number against the prohibited list as a separate step.
Here is how to do it yourself, free, in a couple of minutes.
For non-agricultural and urban property, go to registration.telangana.gov.in, open the Prohibited Properties search, and enter the district, mandal, village, and survey number. If the parcel is listed, you will see it flagged along with the clause or register it falls under.
For agricultural land, use bhubharati.telangana.gov.in, search the land details by survey number, and read the prohibited status column.
Two details matter more than most guides mention.
First, note which register the survey number sits under. A parcel on the court-case register is a different problem from one wrongly tagged as assigned or endowment land, and the fix is different for each. In the Kukatpally example, the flag was specifically a court-case register entry against the survey number.
Second, the flag is dated. The list is being revised, so an entry you see today reflects the source portal on a particular date and can change. Screenshot it, note the date, and re-check close to registration. For the broader habit of catching silent record changes, see our guide on monitoring your Telangana land records.
If you are checking a property you may inherit or one held in a relative’s name and you do not have the survey number to hand, searching by owner name is the practical route. That is one of the checks Assetly’s find-family-land search is built to run for AP and Telangana parcels.
If your own property is wrongly flagged
If the property is genuinely government, endowment, assigned, or ceiling-surplus land, the flag is doing its job and there is no shortcut. But if you hold a clean registered title to an approved plot and it has been swept in by a survey-number error, there is a route out.
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Assemble the proof. Your registered sale deed and the chain behind it, the pattadar passbook, the layout or building approval (HUDA, HMDA, GHMC, or Housing Board), and any earlier records showing private ownership.
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File a correction. Use the ROR corrections module on Bhu Bharati to raise a grievance to remove the wrongful entry. The matter goes to the District Collector or the review committee that oversees the list. A three-member committee, including a retired district judge, has been set up to examine these.
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Use the public objection window. The state has said it will publish the revised list for public display and invite objections before the survey numbers are locked by gazette notification. That window is your cheapest and fastest shot. Watch for it and file within it rather than waiting for a refusal at the counter.
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Escalate if ignored. If the correction stalls, a writ petition in the Telangana High Court asking for the entry to be reviewed is the established next step, and much of this list exists because of earlier High Court directions in the first place.
Keep every version of your records as you go. If a parcel was flagged, then cleared, then re-listed in a later revision, a dated trail of what the portal said and when is what protects you. Tools like Assetly help by storing those dated copies and flagging when a status changes, which matters most for owners who are not in Hyderabad to check in person.
The honest takeaway
Section 22A is a good idea being applied with a blunt instrument. The goal, stopping the sale of land that was never anyone’s to sell, is worth defending. The execution, flagging survey numbers in bulk and catching lakhs of legitimate homes, is what owners are now paying for in frozen sales and refused loans.
Until the list is cleaned up, treat the prohibited-list check as a non-negotiable step, right alongside reading the encumbrance certificate and verifying the title. A property can have a spotless deed history and still be unregistrable today. In Telangana in 2026, both facts can be true about the same house.
Related Reading
- How to Check if Land Is in a Prohibited Category in India - the national picture, covering FEMA, CRZ, forest, and cantonment restrictions beyond 22A.
- Dharani to Bhu Bharati: Telangana Land Records Explained - how the portal transition reshaped what your records show.
- Managing Property in Telangana: A Dharani and NRI Guide - the wider toolkit for owners handling Telangana property remotely.
- How to Check and Correct Bhu Bharati Land Record Errors - the step-by-step for fixing a wrong entry.
- Lis Pendens and Section 52: Buying Property Under Litigation - what a court-case flag really means for a buyer.
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