This land is my land

We present Microsoft's experience with Bhoomi, where 6.7 million farmers in Karnataka have access to 20 million land ownership records at the click of a button

The state of Karnataka is home to the silicon plateau of the east, Bangalore and has been at the forefront of the Indian IT revolution since its start half a decade ago. The Department of Revenue, under the aegis of the government of Karnataka undertook the Bhoomi project three years ago.

With the help of the National Informatics Center and technology from Microsoft it embarked on an ambitious computerisation initiative to set up land (Bhoomi) record access kiosks in 140 sub-districts across the state. Today, 6.7 million farmers of this southern state in India have access to the 20 million or so different land ownership records available with the government at the click of a button.

This is a far cry from the system that existed till two year ago, when the records acquisition process was manual, marred with procedural delays, inefficiencies and lack of transparency.

MOTHER EARTH OR BHOOMI

75 per cent of India’s population resides in rural areas, and farming has been the staple of the Indian economy for decades. In several states, including Karnataka, the taxes derived from farming contribute to state revenues to a significant extent, and the need for a structured and streamlined process for maintaining land records is evident.

However, there are other important reasons that make such a solution almost imperative. Explaining the reason, Mr Rajeev Chawla, Additional Secretary, Revenue Department and the person behind implementation of this project in Karnataka said, “Land ownership in India isn’t just about economics.

The piece of land a person owns, and the acreage, has played a key role in determining the social identity of farmers for centuries. It’s a combination of the economic and social realities that have made the maintenance of land records such an important aspect of p u b l i c administration.”

MANAGING A MAMMOTH TASK – MANUALLY

Maintaining and providing access to 20 million records of land ownership, for the 6.7 million farmers spread over roughly 27,000 villages of the state, was a manual process. Though in 1991 the government did carry out basic computerisation of records at the district level, only onetime entry was done into the system, and records were just printed and distributed to the farmers, with no provision to keep the system updated or to keep it online. So the dissemination of these records to the farmers across the state was carried out in the traditional offline manner.

The requests from farmers were either for the ‘Record of Rights, Tenancy and Crops’ (RTC) that provided a view of the current holding, or for making changes to the record if a sale or purchase had taken place. For honouring such requests, the village accountants would need to travel to the district office to either obtain or update these records.

THE TWO-YEAR WAIT

For various reasons including the complexity of the task (over years the land had been divided into several small parcels, and physical verification became a tedious process), procedural inefficiencies, and in some cases official negligence, the request for copies of the RTC and for change in land title (mutation) were rarely met in time. Providing a simple RTC could take anywhere between three and 30 days, while a request for change of land records (documents and maps) could take up to two years.

THE SOLUTION

Today, a computerised land record kiosk (Bhoomi centre) is operated in all of the 177 taluks (subdistricts) in the state. Each kiosk is created to provide farmers with details they need regarding their land records. By providing either the name of the farmer or an assigned plot number, farmers can access this information. Kiosks are equipped with touch-screen monitors and simple navigation paths to provide farmers with control over their information.

Of course, village accountants are stationed at each kiosk, but their role is that of a facilitator and not to increase bottle-necks that had become their role earlier. However, their main task is to authorise the land record before delivering them to the farmer.

IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES

The technological needs of this project were clear. The Department of Revenue wanted a platform that would be easy to deploy, as they were keen to complete the computerisation in the shortest possible time. The deployment needed to be easy to manage, and the application user friendly, as most of those impacted by the implementation had not used computers before. Information overload:

One the biggest problem that was faced was with regards to data entry. The number of records was huge, and the educational qualifications of the village officials in charge low, making the process tedious.

Added to this was the apathy of the officials towards the project, attributed to some unsuccessful e-governance projects in the past. The computerisation of the 20- million-odd records, thus, was a complicated and mammoth task.

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