The present day land records have hardly undergone any change during the last 7 to 8 decades. Consequently, they are unable to serve the contemporary requirements due to their inherent limitations, a few of which are readily identifiable.
- The present day land records were mostly conceived by the Maharajahs and the British Crown. Though the British tempered them scientifically, these land records are still out of tune with the aspirations of our times and the planning and developmental imperatives of our economy.
- They wholly emphasize on the fiscal concerns of the State and not on the proprietary clarity.
- They are mostly outdated and do not reflect the ground realities, viz; correct title, correct boundary and correct extent.
- They consist of only rudimentary agricultural/crop statistics and do not provide accurate inputs for micro-level and macro-level developmental activities.
- Both their generation and maintenance are so cumbersome that the State Governments have been finding it very difficult to conduct timely maintenance and updation.
- A direct consequence of the lack of maintenance of the records is the apathy of landholders towards the correct delimitation of their plot boundaries and recording of correct title in land registers, often resulting in vexatious land-based litigation from the lowest to the highest Court in the Country.
- There is an ever-growing mismatch between our agricultural and industrial advancements on one side and jurisprudence of land records on the other. This has been resulting in societal strains and conflicts.
- Agrarian reforms like consolidation of landholdings etc., initiated by the Central and State Governments, failed to fulfill their objectives, because an equally radical culture of updated title referencing system had not been evolved.
- The inherent deficiencies in the field procedures to create graphical land records, in not conforming to a common reference system for the entire country, has now resulted in glaring mis-matches in the small scale maps of districts and States, produced by aggregation of the village level land records.
Since these records presently constitute the conventional LIS, these shortcomings are inherent to the conventional LIS and there is not much that can be done to overcome them, unless the entire system is reorganized and tuned to the needs of the present day. This reorganization has to be effected in terms of the content of the land records, the procedures employed in generating them and the process of maintaining them up-to-date.
Land Records for the New Millennium - A computer based Land Information System (LIS)
In order to get rid of the above mentioned deficiencies and to fully cater to the present as well as future requirements of the landholders on one side and government departments and other organizations involved in land matters on the other, the substitution of the existing and outmoded records with a modern and dynamic system is essential. No doubt, creation of fresh land records throughout the country is a highly cost intensive and time consuming operation. However, there is no escape from the fact that the century-old edifice of conventional land records has been fast crumbling and should be replaced sooner than later, at least in a phased manner, by a contemporary system that is alive to the needs of the day and will remain so for decades to come. For this, it is essential to employ modern methodologies to achieve higher order accuracy, economy and speed in generating spatial database, right from the level of individual landholding. Scientific and economic generation of up-to-date spatial database through modern cadastral surveys is central to the creation of a modern land records system. In order to lessen the financial burden on the State as well as Central Governments, suitable means of funding large scale cadastral survey and land records building activities need to be evolved without further delay. I cannot but visualize the best scenario for Indian land records in the new Millennium thus:
- Extensive private participation in conducting cadastral surveys economically, speedily and accurately and building a computerized data warehouse of land records
- Enhancement of the scope of the conventional system into a versatile and future-proof computerized land information system (LIS)
- On-line maintenance of land records through a fully networked hierarchy of functionaries, right from the village level, ideally upto the national level, with in-built monitoring/check points at Taluq, District and State levels.
In this context, a contemporary LIS can be defined in the briefest form, as an on-line repository of information that enables the most efficient use of land - a scarce national resource.
From an operational point of view, an LIS based on land records relates the macro level developmental programs and landuse practices to the individual landholdings and their owners/enjoyers.
It is no doubt possible to build a comprehensive LIS based on existing land records and village maps and linking them to the title particulars from settlement records and the agricultural as well as irrigation statistics from the annually updated revenue records. The resultant would be a modest and quite a basic form of LIS, which, by implication, is not entirely up-to-date and comprehensive. However, such a modest system does meet the needs of the landholders as well as the administrators at least partially, and the expectations from such a system will also be modest in terms of its scope and accuracy.