Farmers in Kalidindi, Eluru district had a problem that had followed them for years — their own land, locked away from registration by a bureaucratic listing that made it untouchable. On Monday, August 10, 2026, the Chief Minister's Office of Andhra Pradesh announced that Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu met those farmers — and ex-servicemen — at the local Tahsildar office during the 'Mee Bhoomi-Mee Hakku' ('Your Land-Your Right') programme in Kalidindi, Eluru district, and left with orders already issued.

The 22-A Trap: What Was Blocking 830 Families

At the heart of the grievance is Section 22-A of the Registration Act — a notification list that flags certain lands as prohibited for registration, effectively freezing transactions and titles. For the farmers of Unikili, Kalidindi, and Vaivaka villages, inclusion on that list meant their holdings existed on the ground but not in law. 830 families holding 2,745 acres across these three villages could not register their own land.

The 22-A problem is not new to Andhra Pradesh. Successive governments have wrestled with lands that were swept into the prohibited list — sometimes correctly, often not — leaving long-term cultivators in legal limbo, unable to sell, mortgage, or formally inherit what they farm every season.

On-the-Spot Orders: Powers Pushed Down to the RDO

Chandrababu Naidu's response at the Tahsildar office was immediate. He directed the District Collector to vest de-notification powers with the Revenue Divisional Officer (RDO) — pushing the authority to clear 22-A listings down to a district-level official who can act faster than a state-level process typically allows. The move is designed to cut the bureaucratic chain between a farmer's petition and its resolution.

Simultaneously, the administration moved to ensure 2,745 acres belonging to those 830 families would proceed to registration, and 1-B Adangal copies — the revenue record extract that establishes cultivation rights — were distributed to the affected farmers on the spot. Farmers at the meeting expressed gratitude to the Chief Minister.

'Mee Bhoomi-Mee Hakku' and the Larger Land-Title Push

The programme under which Monday's event was held — Mee Bhoomi-Mee Hakku — is the state's structured drive to resolve land title disputes and get Pattadar Passbooks into the hands of rightful cultivators. Andhra Pradesh has previously run digitisation efforts through platforms like the Bhudhaar portal to clean up revenue records across coastal districts, but ground-level disputes — especially 22-A listings — have persisted as a stubborn last mile.

The delegation of de-notification authority to RDOs is the kind of administrative re-wiring that, if replicated across mandals, could accelerate clearances in Eluru and neighbouring districts where similar complaints have piled up.

For the farmers of Kalidindi, the passbook is more than a document — it is collateral for a crop loan, proof for an inheritance, and the legal floor beneath everything they grow. That it took a Chief Minister's visit to unlock it for 830 families says as much about the scale of the backlog as it does about the urgency of Monday's intervention.