Telangana scraps VROs to clean up revenue system

The Telangana government on Monday scrapped the Village Revenue Officer (VRO) system in the state. The scrapping of the VRO system is coinciding with a new Revenue Bill to bring in more transparency and weed out departmental corruption.

The government will present the new Revenue Bill 2020 on Wednesday in the monsoon session of the Assembly. The new Bill, if passed, will replace 139 revenue and land legislations and rules that are redundant and irrelevant, the government said.

The new Bill aims to weed out corruption plaguing the Revenue Department by reducing human interface for land transactions. According to information, the new Bill will make legal the use of blockchain technology that will automatically update land records and mutations immediately.

Of late, there has been a spike in corruption cases in Telangana particularly in the revenue department which tops the dubious list of organisations with ‘most corrupt’ employees in the state. There were many incidents like farmers committing suicide and due mainly to tampering of lands by revenue officials.

Telangana CM Telangana K.Chandrasekhar asked Chief Secretary Somesh Kumar to scrap the village revenue officers and asked them to submit all the documents before 5 pm on Monday. Chief Secretary Somesh Kumar asked all the district collectors to collect all the records concerning the department.

The VROs expressed dissatisfaction over the government’s decision of removing VRO to root out the corruption in the revenue department.

A lawyer Anil Kumar from Warangal told The Daily Guardian, “It’s the right step at the right time. It will weed out the corruption in the state. Other departments also should be careful. The VROs troubled all the farmers like anything. So that I appreciate the government in this regard.”