The Revenue Tests, paper by paper

The Revenue Tests are the professional core of the departmental slate: four objective papers, each 2 hours, 100 marks, minimum 40 to pass, written with the bare Acts on the desk. Their syllabus is a portrait of the revenue officer’s statute book — and, tellingly, a portrait of it as it stood some decades ago. This page walks the four papers, then deals with the anachronisms.

Part-I, Paper-I (paper code 18) — the Common Acts

“Common” here means common to the whole of the old composite state — the Acts that applied in both the Andhra and Telangana areas.

Statute / material	What it is in the field
Indian Treasure Trove Act, 1878	The (genuinely examined) procedure when treasure is found
Land Improvement Loans Act, 1883	Taccavi loans for land improvement
Agriculturists’ Loans Act, 1884	Taccavi loans for distress and inputs
Land Acquisition Act, 1894	The old acquisition law — still the syllabus text, though the field runs on the 2013 Act
AP Rent and Revenue Sales Act, 1839	Sales for arrears of rent and revenue
AP Revenue Recovery Act, 1864 (Act II of 1864)	The arrears-collection machine — attachment and sale for land-revenue dues (the scanned TGPSC syllabus misprints the year as “1894”)
AP Survey and Boundaries Act, 1923	Survey, demarcation and boundary disputes
AP Land Encroachment Act, 1905	Assessment and eviction of encroachers on government land
Board Standing Orders bearing on these Acts, plus Chapter XIII of the Chain Survey Manual	The BSOs are the executive flesh on these statutory bones
AP Irrigation Projects (Special Land Tax) Act, 1976	Special land tax under project ayacuts

Part-I, Paper-II (paper code 27) — the Regional Acts

This is the Telangana-area paper — the Hyderabad-State inheritance, plus the manuals that run a district office.

Statute / material	What it is in the field
AP (Telangana Area) Land Revenue Act, 1317 F (sections in force)	The mother statute of Telangana land administration
Hyderabad Land Revenue Rules, 1951	Rules under the 1317 F Act
AP (TA) Record of Rights in Land Regulation, 1358 F	The old RoR framework — see the anachronism note below
AP (TA) Railways, Govt Irrigation Sources & Public Buildings Protection Act, 1321 F	Protection of public works
AP (TA) Irrigation Act, 1358 F	Irrigation in the Telangana area
The rest of the Board Standing Orders	Everything Paper-I did not take
District Office Manual	How files, registers and despatch actually work
Famine Manual	Scarcity and relief administration
Village Officers laws	The patwari-era village establishment
AP Land Revenue (Enhancement) Act, 1967; Non-Agricultural Assessment Act, 1963	Revenue enhancement and NALA
Tank Improvement Act, 1949; Irrigation Cess Act, 1865	Tanks and water cess
AP Excise Act, 1968	Excise basics
Revenue Secretariat rules and circulars on the above	The circular layer

Part-II (paper code 43) — the accounts paper

Short syllabus, dense material: the Manual of Village & Taluk Accounts, the Special Fund Code, and the Instructions relating to Taluk and Village Accounts of Telangana. This is the paper about the pahani’s siblings — the village accounts, the jamabandi trail, how demand, collection and balance are struck. It reads dry until you have sat through an azmoish; then it reads like a manual for your own inspections.

Part-III (paper code 62) — the wide sweep

Two groups in one paper.

Group A (Common): Indian Stamp Act, 1899 with the Stamp Manual; AP Revenue Summons Act, 1869; AP Court Fees & Suits Valuation Act, 1956; Panchayat Samithis & Zilla Parishads Act, 1959; Revenue Malversation Regulation, 1822; the Five-Year Plans; Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955.

Group B (Regional): roughly 43 items — the long tail of the Telangana-area statute book. The ones that matter most to a Deputy Collector’s actual files: AP (TA) Atiyat Enquiries Act, 1952; AP (TA) Court of Wards Act, 1350 F; Inams Abolition and Conversion into Ryotwari Act, 1955; AP (Andhra Area) Tenancy Act, 1956; Estates (Abolition) Act, 1948; AP Ceiling on Agricultural Holdings Act, 1973; Gram Panchayat Act, 1964; Essential Commodities Act, 1955 with the PDS and procurement control orders; Charitable & Hindu Religious Institutions & Endowments Act, 1966; Forest Act, 1967; Limitation Act, 1963; Cooperative Societies Act, 1964; and more of the same vintage.

The Bhu Bharati anachronism

Here is the oddity you must hold in your head with both hands. The Telangana Bhu Bharati (Record of Rights in Land) Act, 2024 (Act 1 of 2025) replaced the Record-of-Rights framework from April 2025 — yet the Revenue Test syllabus PDFs still list the 1358 F RoR Regulation and the rest of the pre-Dharani corpus, and no G.O. updating the Revenue Test syllabus for Bhu Bharati was traceable as of 22-08-2026 (unverified as a watch item; AP separately revised its own EOT syllabus from May 2025, but that is AP only). The same holds for the Land Acquisition Act 1894 sitting in Paper-I while the field runs on the 2013 Act. The working rule: prepare from the syllabus as printed — the examiner sets questions from the listed texts — while keeping the current law straight in your field work. Watch each session’s notification for a syllabus addendum; the BNS-for-IPC addendum for September 2026 shows TGPSC does issue them.

Where this wiki already covers the syllabus

Much of the Revenue Test reading list already has a page here, written for the field rather than the exam — read them together and each version reinforces the other:

• AP Land Encroachment Act, 1905 — the page “The Land Encroachment Act, 1905: evicting from government land” walks the assessment-and-eviction machinery Paper-I examines.
• District Office Manual — “The life of a file under the District Office Manual” in the Drafting Room covers the tappal-to-despatch cycle that Paper-II’s DOM questions come from, and the noting and instruments pages fill it out.
• Land Revenue Act 1317 F and the RoR line — the Land & Revenue section’s “Reading the land records” traces the sethwar–khasra–pahani chain that the 1317 F Act and the 1358 F Regulation created, and the Bhu Bharati pages show what replaced the Regulation.
• Board Standing Orders — the BSOs surface throughout the Land & Revenue and People & Offices pages (government lands, the revenue hierarchy) exactly where each order bites.
• Inams Abolition Act 1955, the Ceiling Act 1973, the Estates Abolition Act — the tenure-history material behind them runs through “Kinds of government land” and the history section’s account of how the Telangana system evolved.
• Essential Commodities Act 1955 — “The 6-A case” in Procedures is a working tour of the Act’s confiscation machinery, the exact ground Group B tests.
• Village Officers laws — “Village officers: patwari to Grama Palana Officer” gives the establishment those laws governed.

What to watch in the field

Order your preparation by paper-code weight on your actual work: Paper-II first (1317 F, DOM, BSOs — you use these weekly), then Paper-I, then 62, then 43. For each Act, build the one-page architecture map before touching question banks — with books in the hall, the map is the exam. And before every session, download the current syllabus PDF from the TGPSC departmental-test portal rather than trusting a coaching compilation: the misprints (Revenue Recovery Act “1894”) and the pending Bhu Bharati revision make the official PDF the only text worth arguing from.