Integration of satellite survey techniques with land record data and web-based service delivery systems on a GIS platform

Integration of satellite survey techniques with land record data and web-based service delivery systems on a GIS platform - A pilot project

Sanjay Dixit
IAS, Special Secretary Revenue, Room No. 237,
Secretariat Bhagwan Das Marg, Jaipur
Telephone: 0141-383374 (O), 700660 (R)
sdixit@raj.nic.in , sanjaydixitias@hd1.vsnl.net.in

History of Land Surveys
Land surveys and Land records as we understand them are around 450 years old in India. In North India, it was Shershah Suri who first gave a shape to methodical settlement of rents based on a complete survey of lands. However, it was left to Akbar and his able minister Todarmal to complete this task and bring in the Zareeb based surveys which are still holding their own almost all over the North India.Circa 1575 A.D., almost the entire tract presently known as Uttar Pradesh and Haryana had been brought under Settlement and this process was extended to other areas from time to time. The British continued to operate the same system and all the Land records which we see in U.P. today are based on this sytem . This same system was adopted by most of the native states so that Rajasthan had the same system in vogue throughout most of the State. Of course, there were local variations which have continued till date. For instance, the length of Zareeb in the entire Eastern part of Rajasthan continues to be 132 feet whereas throughout most of the Western part, it has remained at 165 feet. Of course, there are cases like the Jaisalmer state where there was no system of survey and settlement at all and everything was totally ad-hoc. This problem is now being taken care of by reducing all the measurements into the Metric system, but the usage still remains wedded to the traditional measurements of Bighas and Biswas.

Difficulties Encountered in Surveys and Settlement

Over the years, the manual survey technique has suffered both in quality as well as speed of execution. Moreover, with the increasing desensitization of the survey staff, it has become more a tool for exploitation of the farmers than the real surveys which had become virtually the bulwark of both the Mughal as well the British Administration. The element of expertise, efficiency and sincerity slowly vanished and gave way to a situation where declaration of settlement meant difficulties all-round. It has degenerated to an extent that it became one of the most unpleasant duties of the State to declare Settlement in an area. The stories go that the surest way for an incumbent Govt. to lose an election in any area is to start Settlement operations in that Area. Settlement became synonymous with unsettling of complete communities in some areas where unscrupulous elements virtually wreaked havoc in the name of doing fresh Surveys. When the Governments woke up to this, they predictably found a solution which meant that the jamabandis with all their deficiencies became sacrosanct and it became impossible to make any changes in the Survey based on the ground situation .It is in this context that the model proposed here becomes all the more relevant.

Last 50 Years
The experience of the last 50 years has not been very edifying. The field staff has become very insensitive and lax. On the other hand, the Survey skills have become more and more scarce. Of course, the maintenance of the Land Record is done in the same time-tested manner which was done in the age of Todarmal. While it was possible to keep all this going with the sheer weight of the State behind this activity as it was the mainstay of the State Revenues, the gradual erosion in the importance of Land Revenue as the main source of the State finances has also meant that the focus on speedy settlement has blurred.

The manifestations are seen in the form of extreme exploitative nature that the Settlement process had acquired over the years leading to a decision by the Govt. of Rajasthan to do away with the Department of Settlement altogether and transforming into a much thinner Deptt. Of Land Records which puts its modern function in its true perspective.

The maintenance wing under the Collector has also lost skill in mutations in the maps. The Survey skill among the Patwaris seems to have disappeared completely. The result is that changes in the Land Record position are not reflected in the maps at all. This has resulted in the maps losing their relevance over a period of time. As the Survey and Settlement process has been bogged down with huge delays, so much so that it is not uncommon to find tehsils where the process has not been carried out for 50-60 years. It is equally common to find tehsils where Settlement process has been going on for more than 10 years. A very interesting case in point came to my attention recently when I found that even the first Zareeb had not been cast in a particular tehsil even though the notification for Survey and Settlement ha been in force for 6 years. It is these kind of instances which are becoming only too common over the years which has led us to think of this project where we combine technology with economy and speed for getting accurate surveys; translate them into credible Land Records and then put this all together in a web- based Service Delivery System which takes it down to the village level through self financing backbones with kiosks at the front- end to disseminate all the information including properly digital-signature authenticated Land Records available for a fee. View for free, Pay for authenticated record would be the motto of this exercise. A financing model for this is already in the advanced stages of development.

The Three Imperatives
The three components in this integrated approach are –
A CREDIBLE SURVEY TECHNIQUE
LAND RECORD DATA ENTRY
SERVICE DELIVERY SYSTEM

The Survey Technology
The Survey technologies presently in use are

traditional
Total Stations and other laser-based systems
Aerial photo-reconnaissance
Global Positioning Satellite based systems
Satellite imagery

All these systems suffer from some major infirmities

Total Stations are accurate but extremely time consuming. They are also labour- intensive thus providing only a partial improvement in terms of accuracy but most of the other parameters remain the same.
Aerial Photo-reconnaissance is both accurate and relatively quicker. It is possible to render 1:20000 photographs into 1:4000 scale maps by using photogrammetry techniques with accuracy of upto 5 cms on ground. However, there are some extremely delicate issues involved , specially for a border state like Rajasthan.
1. Overflying large tracts is restricted. In the border districts, it may be impossible to obtain permissions for doing aerial reconnaissance.
2. Ferrying distance for the aircrafts can be very long because of the shortage of air strips in Rajasthan.
3. The cost of a complete integrated system is more than Rs. 150 per hectare.
4. The time taken for even small areas is fairly long - upto a year in most cases .
GPS is both accurate and quick by using kinematic systems with a station on the ground and feeding the coordinates to a 3 or 4 satellite system. With georeferencing available from the coordinates fixed by the Survey of India, an accurate survey can be done within a few days for an average village. However, the cost is prohibitive. It can be anything between Rs. 225-250 for a completely integrated sytems design.
Satellite Imagery is the quickest but accuracy is a major issue. It is also the cheapest with a completely integrated systems design possible for around Rs. 50 per hectare. However, the besst that is available today is a 1 metre resolution image which is just not good enough. In fact, the max. tolerance cannot exceed 10 cms.

With all these factors weighing on our minds, we have devised a system which would combine the best elements of these systems in a way that we get a solution which is quick, cheap and accurate. It is of course necessary to run this on the ground to prove the system . What it involves using the recently available 1 metre resolution images from the Satellites. These images are vectorised in relation to roughly 20 to 100 GPS positions obtained on the ground using a ground earth station. The vectorised satellite image is georeferenced and overlaid in relation to these points. There is this difficulty of matching the Satellite images against the points obtained by the GPS. This is done using standard imaging softwares and the techniques of edge-matching and union. The result is 99% accurate which is good enough for the purpose of Land Surveys for fixing field boundaries. A tolerance of around 20 cm. is good enough for this exercise as the field boundaries themselves can vary greatly in their width depending upon the terrain and the type of soil.

The cost of devising a system based on these parameters is around Rs. 100 per hectares. It also has the advantage that we are able to complete the survey task as soon as the 20 points on the ground are fixed and the information is relayed to the data-host. The rest of the work is then done in the laboratory.

Land Record Data Entry
This work is already being done in the State under the Land Record Computerization programme of the GOI. The work is being done by the NIC and has been excruciatingly slow due to a variety of reasons. This work is now being done on a war-footing in the State of Rajasthan. The manner in which this work has been done till now leaves a lot to be desired. The software codes have been devised on the basis of Jamabandi instead of on the basis of survey numbers, which will make it extremely difficult for web-based GIS integration. Therefore, this is a task which NIC needs to undertake urgently. Proceeding on the basis of existing codes would mean that we may not be able to utilize it for any kind of worthwhile GIS interface.also, the codes have not been standardized and have all ben customized districtwise. This also makes it difficult to run astate-wide GIS based system . We would like to be in a view-free, pay for signed record regime. In order to progress to this regime, it is necessary that anyone going to a first-level GIS map on the homepage of the Land Record Portal of the State should be able to further levels, select the area he wants to see and all the attached record should be available to him. This can only be possible only when the data is attached to the survey nos. first . In fact, this is also time-tested methodology of preparing the basic land records. It is the Misal Bandobast from which the Jmabandi is generated and based on the Misal, it is also possible to generate every kind of other Record. Jamabandi, or the Record of Rights is just one of these records. However, the way software codes have been done in Rajasthan, to search a geographic entity, the string has to run all through the village records to locate a particular geographic entity. You can well appreciate what will happen when this kind of unwieldy search mechanism goes on the net. IF you mark out on areas on the map, God alone can tell how much time it will take for the search to be completed and the result to be obtained on your screen. If we arte waiting for Broadband to solve this problem, then God help us because the villages will continue to depend on the lesser connectivity for a long time to come and it is the common village folk who is the subject matter of this debate.

Even the Land classifications have been done on the basis of District-wise preferences , making it quite impossible to design a State-based GIS platform. The Revenue Board in Rajasthan has taken an important initiative and appointed a task force to sort out this problem which otherwise promises to go against the big picture.

Service Delivery System
The most important and crucial part of this whole structure is the service delivery about which it is now possible to think. The World Wide Web in its present level of development makes it possible to take all the record on the GIS platform along with the attached data . It is so structured that anyone and everyone can interact on the website in a query-based structuring. All applications and requests for mutations are accepted online . It is also provided that all mutations are opened automatically through links from Registration and Succession System Softwares. The access is provided all around the State through kiosks which are self financed and pay a certain fee to the State for the right to provide the authenticated records. As said earlier, “View free, pay for the signed record” includes free downloading of records. It is for the legal document that the person will have to pay a charge which would be much less than the informal charge that he has to pay to the Patwari today.

Conclusion
The need of the hour is to get the public to participate in any model we propose because it is the public participation which makes a success of any experiment or programme. We estimate that a State-wide implementation of this model would get the involvement of at least 80% of the local community. Because of its very design and concept, this project would ultimately dovetail all the developmental programmes with this portal and would become the default portal on Rajasthan. Such a portal has the potential of getting the focus of some 1 crore public if we take into consideration that the farmer and his school going children can be the possible targets of this portal. For all the market expansion that has to take place in the rural markets, this would the unchallenged entry point and this is what makes the whole project exciting for the private parties. After all, a captive eyeball figure of anything upto 10 million pageviews a month to an information starved public which is slowly getting integrated with the mainstream market forces is a factor that is the most appealing part of this project.

On the Internet valuation models, 10 million pageviews of a market would mean a valuation of 200 to 300 crores art the International levels at the present . This is after taking into account the beating that the dotcom valuations have taken on NASDAQ and other international bourses. However, we still do not know what will happen after the advent of broadband and the convergence economy. A very safe assumptiion that is being made is that as soon as the Internet graduates to the TV, there would be an overnight 8 fold jump in the eyeball figures . Remember, acccording to the figures released by NASSCOM, the Internet connections are in the region of 2 million and the Internet using public at around 5 million. In contrast, the TV viewing public in the country is estimated at 125 million. This is the possibility which is less than two years old and anyone who can take advantage of the potential of this project by investing at the right time would reap a goldmine. Of course, we are as yet on a Pilot project which is to be funded exclusively by the GOI, but there is always the possibility of our being able to look at proposals for trying out alternative areas with alternative technologies. So here is the clarion all to all comers. Come join hands with the Govt. of Rajasthan in exploring the frontiers of future.