A Health Warning On Land

Context: With livelihoods (due to the migrant crisis) affected, the importance of land ownership for access to formal loans as well as government relief programmes became even more evident. But the relatively poor availability of clear and updated land titles remains a hurdle.

Efforts to improve the state of land records in India

• Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (DI-LRMP) scheme: It provides a common framework for reporting the progress of land record management by states/UTs.
• Land Records and Services Index (N-LRSI), 2020: by National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER). - It assesses states’ performance on Digitisation and Quality of land records.
  • Many states had made improvements in various parameters of the index: g. Bihar’s jumped from the 23rd to 8th position in the index by making substantial progress in the digitization of maps, textual records and registration process.

Reasons for the dismal state of land records in India

• Colonial mindset: Failure of the Indian administration to evolve from British-era land policies.
• Lack of uniform land record regulations and policies: the heterogeneous nature of regulations/guidelines for land record management in India makes progress non-uniform).
• Lack of skilled manpower: noted in the pilot impact assessment of DI-LRMP
• Poor synergy across land record departments:
  • According to N-LRSI analysis, there is a lack of synergy between the revenue department (custodian of textual records), the survey and settlement department (managing the spatial records) and the registration department (responsible for registering land transactions).
  • Thus there will be a divergence between the land area reported by the textual and spatial record, which may enhance legal disputes. 
• Lack of provision for Online Mutation on the same day as the registration: Mutation means the swiftness of the process of updating ownership as the result of the registration of a transaction.

Way Forward: It is only by strengthening the institutions that the desired quality of land records can be attained.

• The improved system of land records is likely to facilitate the efforts that some states/UTs are making to ease land transactions — like lowering stamp duties by the Maharashtra government — to meet its increasing demand for housing, infrastructure.