Hyderabad: The Telangana High Court has sentenced the Collector of Ranga Reddy district to six months' simple imprisonment for wilful disobedience of its order, and imposed a fine, suspending the sentence for four weeks to let the officer appeal.
Justice K Lakshman passed the order while allowing a contempt petition, holding that the Collector had failed to decide a representation that the writ court had ordered him to dispose of within 60 days.
The dispute runs back to the implementation of an order passed in August 2022 by the then Collector, which deleted certain plots from the Prohibitory Properties Register under Section 22-A of the Registration Act, 1908. The petitioners, seeking no-objection clearances for those plots, moved the High Court after that decision was not given effect to; in August 2025 the writ court directed the incumbent Collector to consider their representation of 2024 and take a decision within 60 days.
The order was served that month. No decision followed. The contempt petition was filed on October 15, 2025 — and, the court recorded, it was only after that filing that the Collector issued notices to the petitioners, held a hearing and passed a rejection order on February 26, 2026. A second rejection order was passed on July 8, 2026, after the court once again directed a reconsideration, this time following the dismissal of the State's Land Revenue Appeal No. 8 of 2022. That appeal, which challenged a Land Reforms Tribunal order of January 5, 2004, had been filed after a lapse of about 18 years and was dismissed on April 25, 2026 as barred by limitation.
The court found the Collector's counter affidavit "palpably false". The counter said that on receipt of the High Court's order, notices were issued and material was called for from the then Tahsildar and the Revenue Divisional Officer. In the hearing held on February 21, 2026, however, the columns for the signatures of the RDO, the Tahsildar and the Authorised Officer were left blank, even though the petitioner present signed in his column.
The court also faulted what it called selective compliance. Of the four survey numbers under dispute, Survey No. 537 was deleted from the prohibitory list while Survey Nos. 536, 657 and 658 were retained, with no explanation of why one was treated differently from the others. "On one hand, the respondent deletes Survey No.537 and several other survey numbers from the prohibitory list of properties under Section 22-A of the Act, 1908 without following the procedure as contemplated under the Rules, 1974; while on the other hand, opposes the deletion of subject plots from Section 22-A of the Act, 1908 without any valid ground," the court said.
The Collector's principal defence was that the 2004 tribunal order had never been given effect to: no land had been reverted to the declarant under a panchanama in Form XI-A, and unless the procedure under Rules 10A(6), 10A(7) and 10A(8) of the Andhra Pradesh Land Reforms (Ceiling on Agricultural Holdings) Rules, 1974 was followed by the RDO and the Tahsildar, the plots could not be de-notified.
The court rejected the defence as one that could not be raised in contempt, relying on *Jalim Singh v. Nand Kishore* (2026) and *Union of India v. Subedar Devassy P.V.* (2006). "Rightness or wrongness of the order cannot be urged in contempt proceedings. Right or wrong, the order has to be obeyed. Flouting an order of the court would render the party liable for contempt," it said.
Concluding that the respondent had knowledge of the order, adequate opportunity to comply, and no satisfactory explanation, the court found the disobedience "wilful and deliberate" and allowed the contempt petition.
*(With inputs from media reports)*