Single versatile LIS for the entire country
As already stated, land records evolved in India during the Moghul period but were put on scientific foundation by the British, who conducted large-scale surveys to determine the boundaries, extent and reputed ownership of agricultural holdings in the villages. The settlement process that followed, settled the fertility of soil through a reasonably detailed procedure of soil classification. As the cadastral surveys and settlements had been done over a period of nearly 70 years in British India between 1860 AD and 1930 AD through a continuous process of experimentation and refinement, different regions in our country possess different types of land records today, varying in their constitution, implication and content. However, as already mentioned by me in the beginning, the two primary components of Indian land records are common in their constitution and implication, if not in content, for all the regions. This is a positive feature of the existing system of land records, which renders designing a common LIS for the whole country possible. A common LIS for the entire country has certain distinct advantages:
- Creation of a single and uniform system, rather than having to cope with different systems across the country, is certainly more efficient and economical. Standardization of procedures for maintenance and updation becomes easy.
- A single LIS has the intrinsic uniformity and statistical accuracy for better management of land reforms and the national planning process.
Given the various types of graphical and descriptive land records existing in the country, the implementation of a single and uniform national LIS presupposes:
- Standardization of procedures to conduct modern cadastral surveys and to generate graphical and textual records
- Definition of minimum common data for land records, applicable for the entire country
- Minimization of differences in content, implication and constitution of land records obtaining among the States, and
- Standardization of the operating procedures, organizational restructuring and modalities of implementation.
Designing a National LIS
Once the above stated prerequisites are met, two crucially important criteria go into the designing of the national LIS:
- Salient features that characterize the LIS
- Database schema that defines the scope of the LIS
The salient features concern themselves with the creation of a logical and physical model of expectations, operations and procedures of implementation, whereas the database schema defines individual and relevant data entities that go into constituting the LIS.
I visualize a contemporary national LIS with the following salient features:
- A clear perception of the expectations from the national LIS, including an inventory of the present and future needs of the users and design of logical data model to cater efficiently and dynamically to the perceived expectations.
- Standardization of the procedures of generating graphical and textual data and selection of the most suitable programming environment.
- Data security procedures to create a built-in mechanism that serves the privacy aspect of the availability of data, vis-à-vis the players involved, i.e., the public, the NGOs and the Government.
- Standardization of the procedures of maintenance and updation including an inventory of processes to access, validate, update, modify, extract and sell the data to the users at various levels.
- Appropriate legislation covering the whole gamut of operations of the modern LIS - such a legislation can contain specific provisions to make the LIS financially viable and self-sustaining.
- Standardization and the hardware and networking components.
- Standardization of the LIS software
- A comprehensive training module for the departmental functionaries, which duly considers the significance of 'attitudinal change' to make the LIS a success.