GIS , GPS & Land Information System
Alok Sharma Manager (Photogrammetry) Navdeep Kaur Sr. (Production Executive) RMSI A - 7, Sector 16, Noida 201301 Telephone: 4511102 Email: navdeepk@riskinc.com Land from time immemorial has been treated as a measure of wealth, status and power all over the world. In India, during the feudal rules people were awarded favours by the kings in form of titles of ownership for land holdings. Precisely because of this reason Land has also been the source of many bloody wars and disputes not only between the Nations, kings and Jamindaars who wanted to establish there supremacy over each other but also between common people as this was the only source of their livelihood. It has been cause of family rifts turning brothers into enemies. It has also led to disputes running through generations unresolved, attributed to lack of proper land management systems, poor record keeping, negligence on part of those who were supposed to be responsible for Land Management and also an inefficient judiciary. Land has also served as a strong tool for manipulation and exploitation of the poor. It has also been a root cause of many a malpractice carried out by those who were rich and influential which results in an exorbitant loss of revenue to the exchequer each year, year by year. People have shown irrigated areas as non-irrigated, Fertile lands as Barren, curtailed the crop yields by declaring lesser hectarage of cultivated land. There are numerous instances where these perjuries are performed in cognizance with the Patwarees who form the lowest link in the chain of Revenue officials and are primarily responsible for the accuracy in cadastral database. Even if we forget for a while all the problems that have occurred and resulted in corruption due to an inefficient system of Land Management there is another aspect to the whole scenario of Land Management. Almost any project that has to be executed requires a basic planning both at macro and micro level. To carry out this task one requires information, which is correct and available in time. Take an example of a National Highway to be constructed. The planners at the time of planning the alignment need to know the type of land the alignment would be passing through. Is it a high fertile, irrigated and cultivated private land or is land available, which is barren, or government holding where the cost of land acquisition would be minimal or null. At the time of acquiring the land what compensation needs to be given to each owner whose land is being acquired. The inventory needs to be created for maintaining the status of Land Acquisition and progress thereof. Take another example for a command area development project where the distribution and drainage network system needs to be designed. Not only one requires information about the land ownership for land acquisition purpose but also one needs to carve out chaks and subchaks of 4-6 Hectares which are going to be irrigated as one single unit. For creating these units one has to keep a track of areas, ownership, crop being cultivated to ascertain the water needs of each holding and then for the entire subchack. Various permutations and combinations of the subchak geography are made and analyzed to determine the best and the most optimum way of utilizing the available water resources. All the examples and facts stated above establish in no uncertain terms the importance of land and also the importance of the fact that there has to be an efficient system to manage it. The question: do we have such a system in place? The answer is self-evident. Certainly, we do not have an efficient Land Management System in place. We are still dependent on the age-old methods of creating and maintaining the Land records. This system of manual surveys, Cloth bound cadastral maps, non-uniform structures of record of rights, each state maintaining this database as a hard copy register created in their respective languages, lack of dedicated and qualified people who can maintain and update these records both in the record of rights as well as the cadastral maps, can not meet the objective of being an efficient one. There is a dynamic relationship between the holding, its owner, and the department responsible to keep track of transactions. The system for managing the land therefore also has to be a dynamic one. Some such deficiencies, which have been a major cause of dysfunction of the system, are listed below:
Land Information System (LIS) can be an alternative, which can provide us a better and more efficient system for Land Management. An LIS is a digital system having spatial (graphical) and aspatial data for each land holding. Since the two are maintained in digital form it is possible to edit, maintain, rectify and keep the record up-to-date with least efforts. It can possibly give a reprieve to both the landowners as well as the institutions of Government, which require information for planning and implementation. Whereas people will have access to the information regarding their own holdings the institutions will be able to extract information for the entire area of their interest. It will also be able to maintain and track changes, detect errors, make on-line corrections, and make Land Management a process dependent activity rather then a people dependent one. It will also ensure that a transparent and reliable system is in place with chronology of events pertaining to a land holding duly recorded and kept for ready reference. This will not only ensure that the manipulation and wrong doings are minimized if not eliminated, but will also ensure that a system gets gradually evolved, where rights to access the database and to edit it is provided based on the sensitivity of the data and ensuring that only the person qualified to carry out the required edits is able to perform the task. A national level LIS will also ensure a uniformity of language and the fields for the records of rights which will allow planners to use it across the states. Various analysis and modeling would be possible to be carried out for a better and efficient land management system. LIS will also ensure that the revenue tracking is correct and there is no loss to the exchequer on account of mis-reporting by the landowners. Also, it will ensure that the payments to the landowners in case of Land Acquisitions are accurate. It will also aid people to track the revenue flows for various land-related activities. A national level LIS will also be useful in case of carrying out projections for crops, yields, etc. Also, this can serve as a powerful database in disaster management and loss assessments in times of natural calamities like floods. A national level LIS can also help arrive at the threshold limits to which each holding can be fragmented to, as it is evident from studies that fragmentation beyond a certain point result in diminished productivity. In India, village is the basic unit of our social, political and administrative functioning. A correct, efficient and scientific database of this unit can go a long way in overall upliftments of the social and administrative functioning of the society. To reap all the rewards of a LIS and to generate maximum gains out of it, the database structure will have to be defined in national context. At present different database is available in different places. There is no single coherent source where the entire data is available as a single cohesive database. A national level database can fill this vacuum. Data pertaining to Irrigation, catchments, rainfall, crops, temperature, soil type, salinity, landuse, revenues, can all be clubbed within the frame work of a National LIS. A beginning has to be made and the first step in this direction can be to create the basic infrastructure. This can be done by making the cadastral maps digital and also by taking the exercise of converting all record of rights in one language and again making this database available in an RDBMS like Oracle. GIS and GPS in LIS: Only by adopting a modern approach of surveying can one fulfill the concept of national level GIS. Anamolies that are present in the conventional cadastral maps need to be addressed to. Also, looking at a national perspective, one will be dealing with vast land areas where the curvature of earth would be affecting the quality of output. While dealing with a large survey area the earth can not be treated as a flat surface and hence, one will have to establish the geographic control stations for plannimetric horizontal control. The GPS can provide a helping hand in this regard. The GPS can be used to create the primary and secondary control in each village area in sufficient density. These control stations can then be plotted on the existing cadastral map and the cadastral map then can be georefrenced with respect to these coordinates. This will not only help in creating an individual village level database which is free from earth curvatures but will also result in making a seamless database joining adjacent villages to create an accurate Block level LIS, joining Block level maps to create a district level LIS and so on. In addition to providing a framework of control stations the GPS can also be used to survey and incorporate details of various important landmarks. Any changes in the holding geography can also be surveyed and the spatial database can accordingly be modified. The advantage of using the GPS is that it is rugged and can provide sub meter level accuracy in measurements. It also makes a direct download of survey data possible into various GIS packages where one can then modify edit the spatial data as per the need. The GIS provides LIS the power to analyze the data. It is only as a GIS that the LIS would work as a decision support system. The two databases created (spatial and aspatial) can be linked effectively only with the GIS concepts. The land holdings, which are essentially polygons, require a polygon topology to be built and then the attribute data (Record of Rights/aspatial data) will then have to be attached to these individual polygons. Any change which happens in the titles or the geographical boundary of the land holding will have to be updated using the GIS background so that the necessary relationship between the two types of databases can be maintained each time a change in any of the component (spatial or aspatial) occurs. It is only within the periphery of GIS that the full potential of the LIS can be exploited. All analysis, study of evolving patterns, manipulation of resource assets, strategic planning based on What-If scenario studies, creation of conceptual models, presentation of patterns by thematic mapping, the list is endless in uses, doors to which GIS will open up by its strong concepts while manipulating the LIS database. | ||
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