Development oriented land administration in India - A case for national LIS


Need to replace manual Cadastral System
Fortunately, we, in India, have in place a multipurpose Cadastral System, catering to the legal requirements like rights in land, conveyancing etc., fiscal requirements like land taxation, valuation etc., technical requirements like scientific mapping and documentation and administrative requirements like planning and monitoring development programmes. In practice, however, managing land has become a serious problem in our country because of rapid population growth, which has caused :
  1. tremendous pressure on rural land; and
  2. uncontrolled growth of cities due to large scale exodus of rural people to urban areas.
This phenomenon led naturally to a clearly perceived inadequacy of formal legal and administrative structures for land, which, as our planners now fear, may hinder or even compromise the basic ability of our country to compete in the modern market economy. It is rightly so, because an efficient land records / land information system is a key part of the legal, regulatory and institutional infrastructure of the State, that provides security of tenure, without which the landholders have no incentive to plow, sow, weed and harvest or to invest in irrigation and other improvements that would repay the investments over a period of time.

Here, we should not forget that the LIS/LRS is not an end in itself. By defining and legally protecting formal property rights, it provides for social stability, property taxation, land improvement credit, land development, productivity, liquidity, labour mobility and resource management, thus facilitating functioning of dynamic land markets, increased agricultural productivity, sustainable economic development, environmental management, political stability and social justice.

It is undeniable that we have to replace the existing manual land records systems of different States in India which are quite outdated and not fully relevant, by a contemporary automated national LIS.

Criteria for a modern Land Records System
To achieve this, a truly modern Land Records System, which has to satisfy the following criteria must come into existence throughout the country without further loss of time:
  1. It must be demand driven, meaning that it must fulfill the demands of its clients, be they landholders or others.
  2. It must support public administration of land; the cadastral information shall be correct and up-to-date enough to be used to formulate, implement and monitor land policies such as those concerning land reforms, land acquisition, land consolidation and land markets.
  3. Its data must be truly transparent and accessible to the general public, subject to the protection of individual and private interests so that the information provided is not misused.
  4. It must be dynamic and self-sustaining.
India urgently needs Cadastral Reforms - "Cadastral Perestroika" as Justice V.R.Krishna Iyer put it - to build and manage a national Land Records System or LIS.

Key issues for Cadastral Reform
I identify the following as the key issues that require serious and immediate attention for such a reform;
  1. the need for appropriate land policies at the national level;
  2. the need to determine the type of land tenure to be defined by the land title, uniformly for the whole nation;
  3. the need to develop the necessary legislative framework to support the national cadastral system;
  4. the need to consider the economics of different solutions or approaches in establishing the national cadastral system;
  5. to determine the needs at the local level to meet user requirements;
  6. the need to identify and adopt appropriate technology for conducting cadastral surveys, computerisation of land records and their on-line maintenance;
  7. the need to establish appropriate processes, systems, HRD strategies and institutional arrangements in support of the modern national LIS;
  8. the need to redefine the roles of the industry, government and academia in creating and supporting the national cadastral data infrastructure;
  9. the need to create standards at the national level for cadastral survey equipment and methodologies, database management practices, data structures, data dictionaries, nomenclature, scales and accuracies, symbology and data exchange formats;
  10. the need to evolve a scientific land valuation system that facilitates the application of modern financing and insurance practices/instruments to the agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry and other sectors, with the ultimate objective of imparting the crucially important attributes of self-sustenance and economic viability to the national government's avowed programmes for rural development.
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