Who keeps the village record: the revenue system from Salar Jung to Bhu Bharati

Strip away the portals and the acronyms and the revenue system answers one question: who keeps the village record, and how do we know it is true? Telangana has answered it five different ways in 150 years — hereditary accountant, salaried village officer, nobody-plus-a-portal, and now a new cadre with the old duties. Every answer left records behind that you still handle.

Before the reforms: farmed revenue, hereditary keepers

Mid-nineteenth-century Hyderabad collected land revenue largely by ijara — farming out the right to collect a district’s revenue to the highest bidder, who squeezed what he could. Between the state and the cultivator stood hereditary intermediaries: deshmukhs and deshpandyas at the pargana level, and at the village the patwari (accountant) and patels (headmen), holding their posts as heritable watans. Record-keeping was the patwari’s family trade; the record’s accuracy depended on his honesty, and his honesty had no supervisor.

Salar Jung: districts, taluks, survey, ryotwari

Salar Jung I, Diwan from 1853 to 1883, rebuilt this from the top. Revenue farming was abolished and replaced with salaried district administration — the zilabandi reforms dividing the state into districts (zila) and taluks, run by taluqdars and tahsildars answerable to a Board of Revenue. On the land itself, Hyderabad adopted the ryotwari principle for its khalsa (government) villages: the state settles revenue directly with the cultivating ryot, with no zamindar in between. (Jagir and inam villages — a third or more of the state — stayed outside this system until their abolition after 1948; that story is the land-reforms article.)

Ryotwari needs measurement. From the 1870s Hyderabad ran survey settlement operations village by village: every field measured, numbered as a survey number, classified by soil, and assessed. The settlement produced the sethwar — the register of each survey number’s extent, classification and assessment — and the surveyor’s tippan sketches. These are the birth certificates of every survey number you administer; when extents clash today, offices trace back to the sethwar.

1317 Fasli: the code

The machinery was codified in the Land Revenue Act, 1317 Fasli (1907–08 AD) — the Hyderabad land-revenue code covering assessment, collection, revenue officers’ powers, records and boundaries. Three things to hold onto. First, it is still in force: adapted through 1956 and 2014, it survives as the Telangana Land Revenue Act 1317F, and the Bhu Bharati Act 2025 expressly leans on it for undefined expressions. Second, it is why so much procedure feels older than any G.O. — appeal and revision habits, boundary-dispute mechanics, the very idea of a “revenue officer” hierarchy all sit in it. Third, its companion administrative canon, the Board’s Standing Orders, likewise survives, administered today by the CCLA as the Board of Revenue’s successor.

Under the code, the annual cycle you still recognise took shape: azmoish (field-by-field crop inspection) feeding the pahani, and jamabandi (the annual audit of village accounts, fixing the year’s demand in the faisal patti). The patwari wrote; the girdawar (today’s Revenue Inspector) checked; the tahsildar answered for the taluk.

The khasra pahani era

After the Police Action, the 1950s Hyderabad government undertook a great record-making exercise across the newly integrated, newly de-jagirised countryside. Its monument is the khasra pahani of 1954–55 — a comprehensive base pahani recording, for every survey number, who held and who cultivated it as it then stood. Because it captured the position just after jagir and tenancy reform, courts and revenue officers treat the khasra pahani as the starting point of the modern title chain. Most legacy disputes you will hear are argued from the khasra pahani forward — and it is in Urdu.

The patwari’s end (1980s) and the taluk’s end (1985–86)

Two NTR-era demolitions reshaped the field machinery of united Andhra Pradesh, Telangana included.

The patwari system was abolished in the mid-1980s. The hereditary part-time village-officer posts — patwari and karanam, patel and village servants — were done away with by ordinance and legislation in 1984–85, after long criticism that hereditary keepers of the record were petty monarchs of the village. Salaried village functionaries replaced them, evolving over the following decades into the Village Revenue Officer (VRO) and Village Revenue Assistant (VRA) cadre. The practical inheritance: records written before the mid-1980s are patwari records, in the patwari’s conventions and often his private shorthand; “the patwari wrote it” is still the explanation for many an odd entry.

Mandals replaced taluks in 1985–86. The old map of large taluks (each under a tahsildar, subdivided into firkas) was redrawn into many more, much smaller mandals, each with its own revenue office — the express aim being administration within a citizen’s reach. The Tahsildar became the Mandal Revenue Officer (MRO); the title Tahsildar later returned, and both are used today. For records, this is a live fault line: pre-1986 records are filed by taluk, and a single old taluk’s papers may now be split across several mandal offices — or still sitting in the erstwhile taluk headquarters.

Alongside, the record-of-rights framework of the AP era — the Rights in Land and Pattadar Pass Books Act of 1971 and its pattadar passbooks — governed how ownership entries were made and corrected, with the VRO as the village-level keeper and first informant.

The VRO era and the 2017–18 purification

From the 1980s to 2020, the VRO was the answer to the opening question: keeper of the village accounts, conductor of azmoish, first port of call for every certificate and enquiry. The cadre was also chronically accused of rent-seeking, and the record it kept had drifted badly from the ground. In 2017–18 the new state ran a Land Records Updation Programme — teams walking villages to purify the record — followed by new pattadar passbooks. The drive fixed much, parked what it could not resolve, and set the stage for a technological leap.

2020: Dharani — the rupture

In 2020 the state answered the old question radically: nobody keeps the village record; the portal is the record. The Rights in Land and Pattadar Pass Books Act 2020 replaced the 1971-lineage RoR law; the VRO posts were abolished by a companion Act (VROs redeployed to other departments, and the VRA system wound up in 2023); and the Dharani portal launched on 29 October 2020, integrating registration and mutation into one automatic act. Sale-plus-mutation in minutes was real and popular. But the design deleted the human layer entirely: no field enquiry before a change, no village accounts, no appeal — errors went straight to the civil courts and the High Court, and doubtful parcels (about 18 lakh acres) were parked in Part-B, freezing their owners out of transactions. Between 2023 and 2025 the Revenue Department had no dedicated village functionary at all.

2025: Bhu Bharati — the restoration

The Bhu Bharati Act (Act 1 of 2025, portal launched 14 April 2025, statewide from 2 June 2025) is best read as a restoration with the good parts kept. Kept: the electronic RoR and instant mutation on registration. Restored: notice and enquiry before non-registration mutations; a statutory appeal ladder (Tahsildar → RDO → Collector/Land Tribunal, with CCLA revision); village accounts (Section 13 — every RoR change flows back into village registers); and a keeper. By G.O. Ms. No. 41 of 22-03-2025, 10,954 Grama Palana Officer (GPO) posts were created — the successor to the VRO, and through him the patwari. About 3,550 ex-VROs/VRAs were appointed from June 2025; direct recruitment for the rest was still in the pipeline as of mid-2026, so in many villages the Revenue Inspector still covers the gap. Field verification got its own institution in the Revenue Sadassulu, village-level public hearings that took in some 8.6 lakh applications in 2025.

Why this still matters at your desk

• Every record is stamped by its era’s keeper. Sethwar and pre-1955 records: settlement staff and patwaris, in Urdu. 1955–1985: patwari pahanis. 1985–2020: VRO records, taluk-then-mandal filing. 2020–25: Dharani printouts — treat with care, they carry migrated errors and had no enquiry behind them. 2025–: Bhu Bharati RoR plus revived village accounts. Dating a record tells you who wrote it and how far to trust it.
• The title chain runs sethwar → khasra pahani → pahanis → RoR. Enquiries and courts walk that chain. A gap in the middle decades (a burnt bundle, a taluk-split loss) is why “call for the old taluk record” is a standard, slow step.
• The 1317F Act and BSO are live law, not heritage. Boundary and assessment questions still land in them; the CCLA administers both.
• The GPO is new and thin on the ground. Where there is no GPO, the RI carries the village; do not draft orders assuming a village officer exists everywhere yet.

Misconceptions

• “Dharani digitised the records.” Computerisation happened years earlier under the AP-era systems and the 2017–18 purification. What Dharani changed was procedure: it made mutation automatic and abolished enquiry, appeal and the keeper. Its data was inherited, errors included — that inheritance is today’s correction workload.
• “The patwari was just a clerk.” He was the village’s memory, assessor’s assistant and often its money-lender’s ally — which is exactly why the post was hereditary, why it was abolished, and why old entries deserve scepticism as well as respect.
• “Mandals have always existed.” Only since 1985–86. Any record, map or file series older than that is organised by taluk and firka — search accordingly.
• “Bhu Bharati is just Dharani renamed.” The portal continuity hides a procedural reversal: enquiry before mutation, appeals inside the department, village accounts and a village officer. The daily work of a Tahsildar under the two regimes is completely different.

Questions you’ll actually get

“Where is my grandfather’s pahani from the 1960s?” In the mandal office holding the old taluk’s records — which may not be the mandal the village is in today. Identify the erstwhile taluk first, then the successor office that inherited its record room.

“Why is the khasra pahani treated as gospel when it’s older than everything?” Because it is the first comprehensive record after jagir abolition and tenancy reform — the clean baseline. Later records must explain themselves against it, not the other way round.

“There’s no VRO in my village — who signs the enquiry?” The GPO where posted; otherwise the Revenue Inspector of the firka. The VRO post itself no longer exists.

“What actually happens at jamabandi?” The annual audit of a village’s accounts by inspecting officers, closing the year’s demand in the faisal patti. Dormant in the Dharani years, it returns with village accounts under Bhu Bharati — expect to sit through one.

Field note for a probationer

Learn to read a pahani’s columns against its date. The same sheet is a different document in 1954 (patwari, Urdu, post-reform baseline), 1994 (VRO, Telugu, taluk-to-mandal transition) and 2022 (Dharani print, no enquiry behind it). The officer who can date a record by its handwriting and layout is the officer the record room cannot fool.