For several years, he has ploughed the land. Yet, at 70, he still cannot call it his own.
Maruthaiah of Bhojannapeta village, just seven km from Peddapalli town in Telangana, finds himself trapped in a legal limbo over 22 guntas of agricultural land his father had bought in the early 1980s through a ‘Sada Bainama’— an unregistered agreement common at the time. After inheriting it, his attempt to regularise the land has stalled, with Revenue officials insisting on an affidavit from the legal heirs of the original seller, an almost impossible condition that has left him waiting indefinitely for a title deed.
