A Sub-Registrar Was Remanded for Registering 22A Land. Get Yours Removed First.
In December 2022, four house plots in Arsapally, on the edge of Nizamabad town, were sold on the same day, by the same seller, at the Nizamabad registration office. Plots 15, 16, 17 and 18 in Survey No. 169/3. Four buyers, four registered sale deeds, about ₹21 lakh in declared value between them.
Two months earlier, the District Registrar had put that survey number on Telangana's Section 22A prohibited property list. The entry named every plot in the layout. It was in the register the day those four buyers walked in.
The registration office is supposed to refuse a sale deed for anything on that list. It did not. This month, the officer who signed those deeds was remanded to judicial custody. Seven people are accused. The buyers hold documents that are now evidence in a police case.
What the list actually does
The 22A list is the register of land the government says cannot be registered: government land, assigned land, endowment land, land under a court order, and land the state has flagged for other reasons. When a survey number is on it, the registering officer must refuse any sale, gift or mortgage document against it. Not slow it down. Refuse it.
It does not take your land away. You stay the owner. You just cannot transfer it through the registration system, and no bank will lend against it, until the entry is gone. In Arsapally, someone decided the entry could be worked around. It could not, and four years later the paperwork caught up with everyone involved.
A lot of genuine land is on that list
Since the state rebuilt the list during the move from Dharani to Bhu Bharati, tens of thousands of genuine private properties have landed on it by mistake. The Revenue Minister has put the number at 95,735. Thousands of owners have gone to the High Court. Many more have filed grievances with the revenue department: we counted 44 such applications in 2022, and 4,098 in 2025.
So if your land is on the list, you are in a large crowd, and most of that crowd has done nothing wrong. But the Arsapally case shows the one thing you cannot do about it. You cannot sell first and sort it out later. The entry has to come off before the deed is presented.
How an entry comes off
There is a defined route, and it ends at the District Collector, not the registration office. For agricultural land, you file on the Bhu Bharati portal under ROR Corrections, choosing the grievance for inclusion in the prohibited properties list. You enter your passbook number, tick the survey number, say why it should be removed, upload your documents and complete an Aadhaar check at a Meeseva centre. For house plots, you file a written representation with the sub-registrar and the District Registrar and keep the acknowledgement.
What decides the outcome is not the form. It is whether your documents answer the reason the land was listed. A court-case entry needs the order that closed the case. Land marked as government land needs proof that it was private land before the list existed, which usually means the old settlement records: the Sethwar, which fixed each survey number's extent when the village was first surveyed; the Khasra Pahani of 1954-55, showing who held and farmed it; and an unbroken chain of sale deeds and link documents from then to you. Assigned land cannot be argued off the list at all; it needs regularisation, which is a different process.
Most applications that fail, fail here. The owner uploads a passbook and the latest sale deed. The Collector's team is asking a different question, about what the land was seventy years ago, and nothing in the file answers it.
Get it off the list, then sell
Landeed's 22A clearance consult exists for exactly this step. For ₹199, we read the entry against your survey number and tell you which category it sits under and what order put it there. We tell you which documents your case needs and which you are missing. Where the old records are missing, we fetch them: Sethwar, pahanis, link documents, certified copies. And we prepare the grievance or representation so that what you file matches the reason for the entry.
Removal is the government's decision and nobody can promise it or a date. What we can promise is that you go in with the right papers, on the right route, the first time. That is the order Arsapally got wrong.
What is the Section 22A prohibited property list?
The register of land the registration office must refuse to register documents for: government land, assigned land, endowment land, land under a court order, and land the state has flagged by order. An entry bars registration. It does not cancel your ownership.
What is a sub-registrar?
The officer at the local registration office who registers sale deeds and other property documents. The law requires them to check the 22A list before registering.
What is a survey number?
The government's ID for a piece of land in a village. House plots carved out of it keep the survey number and add a plot number, so a 22A entry on the survey number covers every plot in it.
Who removes a 22A entry?
The District Collector. The registration office holds the list but cannot take an entry off it.
What is a Sethwar?
The original survey settlement record for a village, fixing each survey number's extent and classification. It is one of the documents that shows land was private before the prohibited list existed.
