Part-B lands and record purification

When Dharani went live in 2020, the migration sorted every parcel into two bins. Clean entries went into the main record — Part-A — and could transact. Everything doubtful — disputed entries, unclear extents, missing links, suspected government interest — was pushed into Part-B and frozen: no sale, no mutation, no passbook, often no scheme payment. Roughly 18 lakh acres ended up parked there, and for five years most of it stayed parked, because Dharani had no enquiry or appeal machinery to clear it. A Part-B family could watch Rythu Bharosa pass them by and be refused a crop loan, for a defect they were never told the particulars of and had no forum to contest.

Purification — clearing Part-B and correcting the wider mass of migrated errors — is one of Bhu Bharati’s central promises, and it is live work now. It is also the workstream where the temptation to treat title questions as data-entry fixes is strongest, and most dangerous.

Why parcels landed in Part-B

Knowing the failure mode tells you the cure. The common categories:

• Record gaps — a missing link in the chain: an old unregistered transaction, an unmutated succession, a sub-division never carried into the survey records.
• Extent and survey-number errors — entries that did not tally with the sethwar or with the sum of sub-divisions.
• Suspected government interest — parcels flagged as possibly poramboke, shikam, assigned, ceiling, endowment or wakf land, often on thin or wrong tagging; the mirror problem is patta land wrongly entered in the prohibited (POB/CARD) lists.
• Pending disputes — court cases or rival claims noted at migration.
• Notional khatas — holders given only a notional entry rather than a patta, leaving them visible in the system but unable to transact.

Each category points to a different disposal: a record gap may resolve into a mutation or a Section 6 sada bainama case; a wrong extent is a correction; a genuine government interest means the parcel stays out of private hands; a wrong prohibited tag needs Collector-level removal.

How purification actually proceeds

There is no single “de-notify Part-B” order. Each parcel is a case, and the machinery has three moving parts.

1. Revenue Sadassulu — intake and spot verification. The village-level public hearings held under Bhu Bharati are the field face of purification. Across three phases covering 593 mandals, 10,725 sadassulu were held, receiving about 8.58 lakh applications by mid-2025 (some reports put the figure at 10 lakh including complaints). Grievances are received in the village, and spot enquiries follow. Government claimed more than 60% resolution (excluding sada bainama cases), targeting disposal by 15 August 2025 — treat the resolution percentage as a government claim, not an audited figure.

2. The correction modules — formal disposal. Cases move through the portal’s RoR-correction (Modification Request Application) machinery, which Dharani never had. Jurisdiction is value-linked under the Rules: for several correction types the RDO is competent where the land value is below ₹5 lakh, and the District Collector above ₹5 lakh.

3. The Collector’s reserved categories. Three purification-critical powers lie with the Collector irrespective of value: conversion of a notional khata to patta; removal from wrongly tagged prohibited lists (POB/CARD) — the classic case of patta land wrongly marked prohibited; and corrections to the nature of property, along with NALA-to-agriculture reversions.

Orders in these streams are appealable up the Section 15 ladder, and fraudulent entries uncovered during purification — particularly involving government, endowment or wakf land — go up for Section 16 revision by the CCLA rather than being quietly corrected, with Section 20 consequences where passbooks were obtained by fraud.

A worked example: releasing — and refusing to release

Two Part-B files from Chintalapalli village reach the Collectorate together.

File 1 — Sy.No. 133, 2 acres, claimant Bhoomaiah. Parked in Part-B in 2020 as “prohibited — POB list”. The enquiry pulls the chain: sethwar shows the number settled as ordinary dry patta land; the khasra pahani shows Bhoomaiah’s grandfather; an unbroken pahani run shows the family as pattadar and possessor; no assignment, no ceiling case, no endowment interest anywhere in the record. The POB tagging traces to a clerical sweep at migration that caught a block of survey numbers adjoining a tank. The tank’s shikam is Sy.No. 134, not 133. This is the Collector’s reserved category — removal from a wrongly tagged prohibited list — and the order releases 133 into the main record with reasons tracing the chain. Bhoomaiah gets his passbook after six years.

File 2 — Sy.No. 134/2, 1 acre 20 guntas, claimant Devender. Also tagged prohibited, also claimed as old family patta. But here the sethwar classifies the parcel as shikam of the village tank, and the pahani run shows cultivation entries only in drought years. The FTL determination puts the parcel inside the tank spread. However sympathetic the cultivation history, this is government land; the tagging was correct. The order declines release, records the FTL basis, and notes the encroachment position for separate action. If a passbook had somehow issued over it in the Dharani years, that entry is Section 16/20 material.

The two files look identical at intake. Only the chain — sethwar, khasra pahani, pahani run, FTL — separates the citizen wronged by a tag from the tag doing its job.

Edge cases and common mistakes

• Treating release as data entry. A Part-B case is a title enquiry. Releasing government land into a private khata is the error that ends careers; Section 20 attaches to fraudulent entries, and Section 16 revision will find the file.
• The half-right claimant. Many Part-B parcels have a genuine private claim to part of the extent and a government interest in the rest — a patta parcel whose recorded extent silently swallowed adjoining poramboke. Release exactly what the chain supports, with a sub-division, not the tagged block wholesale.
• Jurisdiction slippage. A notional-khata conversion processed at RDO level, or a high-value correction disposed below, is an order by an incompetent authority — reversible on appeal and a standing audit objection. Route by category first, value second.
• Rival claimants in the queue. Where two parties each seek release of the same parcel into their own khata, the correction module is the wrong battlefield — the dispute is title, for the civil court under Section 18, and the record should wait for the decree rather than pick a winner.
• Rythu Bharosa and loan pressure as evidence. The party’s urgency is real — schemes and credit ride on the RoR — but urgency is not evidence. Prioritise the file; do not lower the proof.

Questions you’ll actually get

“Why is my land in Part-B when I have a passbook from 2015?” Because the 2020 migration flagged something — a tagging, an extent mismatch, a suspected government interest. The remedy is a correction application; the enquiry will pull the record chain, and the pre-2020 passbook is part of the evidence.

“Who can remove my land from the prohibited list?” The District Collector, irrespective of the land’s value — that category is reserved. Applications route through the portal or MeeSeva; the office builds the enquiry.

“I have a notional khata. Can I sell my land?” Not until it is converted to patta — a Collector-level correction. Once converted and in the main record, ordinary Section 5 registration applies.

“The sadassu in our village noted my case a year ago. Nothing has happened.” Sadassu intake is the start, not the disposal — the case still moves through the correction machinery to the RDO or Collector by value. Take the acknowledgement number and chase it in the office; the appeal ladder applies only once an order is passed.

“My neighbour’s Part-B land was released; mine, the same survey number block, was not. Why?” Because release is parcel-by-parcel on the record chain, not block-by-block. Ask for the order in your case; if it is a rejection, 60 days to appeal.

What to watch in the field

Know your purification pendency numbers before every review meeting — by category (prohibited-tag removals, notional khatas, extent corrections) and by value band — because the ₹5-lakh rule means the pendency sits precisely at RDO and Collector desks, and this workstream has standing political attention. On the files themselves, hold the line: walk the chain from the khasra pahani forward, confirm no government interest, and put the FTL or classification evidence on record when you refuse. The affected citizen has usually been locked out since 2020, and every month of delay has a rupee cost to the party — prioritise accordingly, but never at the price of the enquiry.