Kinds of government land

“Government land” is not one thing. The classification a parcel carries in the sethwar and pahani decides what can lawfully be done with it — and what you must do when someone is sitting on it. Get the classification wrong and every subsequent order is wrong: an eviction from land that could have been assigned, an assignment of land held for a public purpose, a regularisation of a void transfer. This page walks the categories one by one, then shows how classification drives an actual file.

The categories, one by one

Poramboke. Unassessed government land reserved for common purposes — roads, tank beds, streams, burial grounds. It cannot be assigned or occupied; most land-grab complaints are poramboke encroachments. On an encroachment file the answer is eviction, not regularisation, because the land is held for a public purpose the office cannot bargain away. The working eviction machinery for government land generally is the Land Encroachment Act, 1905 — notice, then removal — read with current instructions; the enquiry record (classification proof, panchanama of the encroachment, measurement) is what sustains the order.

Shikam. Land under a tank’s water spread — government land even when the tank is dry. Shikam encroachments surface every drought, when dry beds get ploughed; the full tank level (FTL) survey decides where shikam ends, so an encroachment case stands or falls on the FTL determination. Never accept cultivation history as title here: intermittent drought-year cultivation entries in the pahani prove opportunism, not right.

Abadi / gramakantam. The village habitation site. House plots inside it sit outside the agricultural revenue record, which is why abadi disputes rarely turn on pahani entries — possession, house-tax and panchayat records matter instead. Encroachment questions here usually belong with the local body as much as with revenue, and mutation of such property runs under the local-body laws, not the Bhu Bharati machinery (proviso to Section 7).

Banjar. Uncultivated government waste — the pool from which assignments are made. This is the one category where an occupation file can lawfully end in assignment to an eligible landless person rather than eviction, subject to the current assignment policy. That single fact makes banjar-vs-poramboke the most consequential classification call on routine files.

Assigned land. Banjar already given free to the landless poor for cultivation or house sites, on the permanent condition that it never be sold. Transfers are void under the POT Act 1977; the officer’s work is resumption from purchasers and restoration to assignees — covered in its own page. On a government-lands file, the trap runs the other way: assigned land is no longer available for fresh assignment or alienation, however “vacant” it looks.

Ceiling surplus land. Land taken over from holders exceeding the legal maximum under the AP Land Reforms (Ceiling on Agricultural Holdings) Act 1973, for distribution to the landless. Ceiling files are old but never quite closed — surplus land that was never distributed, or was re-encroached by the original holder, keeps resurfacing. A ceiling-surplus parcel carries its own statutory destination; it cannot be quietly folded into the general assignable pool.

Bhoodan. Land gifted during Vinoba Bhave’s land-gift movement, vested in the Bhoodan Yagna Board for the landless. Not ordinary government land: the Board’s vesting means alienations must be tested against the bhoodan framework, and bhoodan parcels wrongly recorded as private patta are a recurring fraud pattern.

Endowment and wakf land. Land of temples and charitable institutions, and property dedicated under Muslim law managed under the Wakf Board. Neither is “government” land in the ownership sense, but the state guards both: they are protected and non-transferable without sanction, fraudulent RoR changes involving them are expressly within the CCLA’s Section 16 revision power, and inam history often decides the underlying title — many endowment parcels descend from service inams, so the inam-abolition record is part of the chain.

Jagir and sarf-e-khas descent. Older still: land that came to government through the abolition of jagirs (1949) and the merger of the Nizam’s sarf-e-khas. Section 3 of the Bhu Bharati Act keeps jagir-type lands non-transferable except through authorised channels. In practice this history surfaces as a distinct title chain to trace when a claimant’s story starts before the 1950s.

A worked example: one complaint, four classifications

A Prajavani petition alleges “land grabbing of 6 acres of government land in Sy.Nos. 41 to 44 of Erragattu village” by one Mallesham, who has fenced the block and begun plotting it. The desk work before any action:

1. Pull the sethwar. Sy.No. 41: classified poramboke — cart track and grazing. Sy.No. 42: shikam of Erragattu cheruvu. Sy.No. 43: government banjar. Sy.No. 44: patta land — settled in a private khata.
2. Sy.No. 44 exits the file immediately. The pahani run confirms Mallesham bought it by registered sale in 2018; auto-mutation under Section 5 stands. Fencing one’s own land is not encroachment. Recording this early keeps the eventual order clean.
3. Sy.No. 41 (poramboke) and 42 (shikam) are eviction territory. For 42, get the FTL determination on record before the order — Mallesham will argue the tank is defunct; the FTL, not the current waterline, answers him. Panchanama of the fencing and plotting, measurement by the mandal surveyor against the tippan, notice, then eviction under the Land Encroachment Act machinery, with the classification proof annexed.
4. Sy.No. 43 (banjar) is different. Mallesham has no claim — he is not landless-poor and his occupation is recent — so he is evicted from it too. But the file should end by noting Sy.No. 43 back into the assignable pool, because three landless families of Erragattu had assignment applications pending; the same enquiry that evicts can feed the next lawful assignment.
5. The plotting angle — government land being fenced and plotted for sale — goes up as well: any RoR mischief that got these numbers into a private khata during migration is Section 16/20 material, not something to fix silently.

One petition, four different legal answers, all decided by the sethwar before anyone argued anything.

Edge cases and common mistakes

• Trusting the portal’s classification. Dharani-era migration mis-tagged in both directions — patta land marked prohibited, government land sitting in private khatas. Classification is proved from the sethwar and khasra pahani, corroborated by the pahani run; the portal entry is the thing being checked, not the check.
• The extent-creep pattern. A genuine patta parcel adjoining poramboke whose recorded extent quietly grew over the decades — the pahani says 3 acres where the sethwar settled 2-20. The surplus is government land inside a private fence. Total sub-divisions against the parent; measure against the tippan.
• “Defunct” tanks. No revenue officer can declassify shikam because a tank has silted up. Until the competent process changes the classification, the FTL governs — and drought-year ploughing never ripens into right.
• Assigning the wrong pool. Fresh assignment can lawfully come only from banjar — not from poramboke, shikam, ceiling-surplus earmarked elsewhere, bhoodan-vested or endowment land. An assignment file starts with the converse of the encroachment check: prove the parcel is banjar and free of every other character.
• Endowment and wakf as “nobody’s land”. Because the institution is often absent, these parcels read as vacant and get encroached, assigned or NALA-converted by mistake. Any file touching land with inam, endowment or wakf history needs the sanction question answered before anything else.

Questions you’ll actually get

“The tank has been dry for fifteen years and my father levelled the bed. Why can’t it be regularised?” Because shikam is government land wet or dry, held for the tank. The FTL survey defines it; cultivation history inside FTL cannot ripen into title, and no officer at any level can bargain it away.

“There is vacant government land near our village. Can our landless families get it?” If it is banjar, yes in principle — assignment to eligible landless poor under the current assignment policy. If it is poramboke, shikam or otherwise reserved, no. The office checks the classification first; ask for the survey numbers.

“The encroacher has been there thirty years. Doesn’t he get rights?” Not against government on these categories — limitation and adverse possession run very differently against the state, and the POT Act and public-purpose reservations defeat purchase-based claims outright. Long occupation may matter to how eviction and rehabilitation are handled, not to title.

“Our temple’s land is being farmed by a private party who shows a passbook.” A passbook over endowment land obtained without sanction is exactly what Section 16 revision exists for. Route the complaint with the inam and endowment record; do not treat it as an ordinary correction.

“Can the panchayat give us house sites from the gramakantam?” Abadi matters run primarily with the local body; revenue’s role is the classification boundary — confirming what is abadi and what is adjoining government or patta land. Get the survey boundary fixed before any allotment talk.

Two levy statutes you’ll still touch

Telangana (AP) Water Tax Act, 1988 (Act 11 of 1988). Levies water tax on all lands receiving water from a government irrigation source — canal, tank or spring channel — graded by category: first- and second-class sources, wet versus irrigated dry, and the duration of supply. The Tahsildar assesses per fasli year for the ayacut of each village; the dues are public revenue on the land, recovered under the Revenue Recovery Act, 1864, with appeals running up the ordinary revenue chain. The collection is small money, but the assessment registers punch far above their fiscal weight: a run of water-tax assessments is standing documentary evidence of a parcel’s ayacut membership and wet classification, and in land disputes — especially shikam and tank-fed classification fights — those registers are often the contemporaneous record that settles what the land was treated as, year by year.

Telangana Irrigation Utilisation and Command Area Development Act, 1984 (Act 15 of 1984). The framework statute for CADAs in notified command areas: compulsory ayacut utilisation, on-farm development works, warabandi water scheduling among ayacutdars, and a set of levies on benefited lands — including a road cess under s.27 at ₹12.35 per hectare per annum. The revenue department’s hook is the recovery clause: all sums due under the Act are recoverable as arrears of land revenue, which is where the Collector and Tahsildar, acting under the Revenue Recovery Act, come in. In practice you will meet the Act less as a live works programme than as its residue — CADA demand extracts arriving for recovery, warabandi grievances mislabelled as land disputes, and command-area notifications that explain why a block of survey numbers carries obligations its owners have forgotten.

What to watch in the field

Never sign anything that changes who holds a government parcel — release, assignment, regularisation, NALA — without the sethwar and khasra pahani on the file. Keep a private map of your jurisdiction’s vulnerable categories: tank FTLs near growing towns, banjar blocks near highways, endowment parcels with absent institutions. Those are where the next land-grab file is already forming, and treat any file quietly converting these categories into private patta as Section 16/20 material to flag upward, not to dispose.