Hyderabad: The Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao gave the green signal for abolition of the VRO postings in the Revenue Department on Monday. KCR convened a cabinet meeting on Monday under his Chairmanship. The Chief Minister has been vocal against the alleged corrupt practices of VRO’s after a series of complaints against them and wanted to bring in radical reforms in the Revenue Department.

With the cabinet okaying the “Telangana abolition of posts of VROs’ bill 2020”, it will now be introduced in the Assembly in next two days. According to the sources, apart from this bill and ten other bills, including one according Administrative sanction for construction of a new Secretariat were also cleared by the cabinet. A few hours before the new Revenue Act was approved by the State Cabinet, the Government had directed the Collectors to take all the files and records from the VROs in their respective districts.

Telangana Chief Secretary Somesh Kumar, who is also In-Charge of Chief Commissioner of Land Administration, sent a message to the Collectors on Monday morning asking them to take over the records and keep them under the custody of Tahsildars. The CS said Tahsildars should obtain a handing over report from the VROs after taking possession of original, printed, handwritten, photo copied or online records, maps, tippons, undistributed Pattadar passbooks, Pahanis and Form1-B, etc.

If there is morethan one village under a VRO’s control, a separate format must be obtained for each village, he said. Reacting to the developments, Telangana VRO’s Association General Secretary H. Sudhakar Rao welcomed the reforms in the Revenue Department and the new Revenue Act. It is unfortunate that the Government is trying to brand VROs as corrupt. VROs should be continued in the Revenue Department. We will lose self-respect if we are drafted into other departments, he said.

The Government had been unhappy with the functioning of VROs following a growing number of complaints on their corruption, funding of records and malpractices.