HYDERABAD: The Telangana High Court has ruled that a registered sale deed cannot be unilaterally canceled, thereby nullifying a cancellation deed issued by registration authorities, while also affirming the rejection of a land regularization application related to the contested property.
Justice Laxmi Narayana Alishetty presided over two interconnected writ petitions filed by 60-year-old Kanneti Kamalamma from Kukatpally, who is asserting her ownership over a 287-square-yard plot in Guttalabegumpet, Serilingampally. The court ruled in favor of Kamalamma regarding the deed cancellation challenge but clarified that authorities still retain the right to revoke the original sale deed as per legal procedures.
The court instructed the district collector to register the land in the prohibitory register under Section 22-A of the Registration Act to avert any further transactions. The petitioner contested the denial of her Layout Regularisation Scheme (LRS) application and criticized the cancellation of her registered sale deed by the authorities.
Kamalamma argued that the draft layout used by the authorities had been withdrawn in 1996 and was therefore invalid for rejecting her application. “The GHMC did not have the authority to execute a registered cancellation deed,” she stated.
Nonetheless, the GHMC asserted that the land was designated as part of a 30-foot road in the layout, which had already been gifted to the municipality via a registered deed. They insisted that the property was allocated for public use and could not be regularized.
After considering the arguments, the court sided with the authorities on the regularization issue, noting that the land was designated as a road in the layout, and concluded that the withdrawal of the draft layout did not change the land’s classification. As a result, the court found no grounds to contest the LRS application’s rejection.
On the matter of the sale deed’s cancellation, the court referred to the Telangana Registration Rules and previous judicial decisions, stating that unilateral cancellation of a registered conveyance is not allowed following relevant statutory changes. Since the cancellation occurred in 2018 without adhering to these rules, the court declared the cancellation deed invalid and unenforceable under the law, thus nullifying it.
