India can't avoid land reforms anymore

Context: The COVID pandemic has provided an opportunity to push for radical land reforms.

Importance of Land:

• Most Preferred Asset: The average Indian household keeps 65% of its assets in the land (NSSO data).
• Used as Collaterals: 60% of all retail loans and 80% of all agricultural loans are indexed to land as collateral (RBI data).

Challenges to Land Reforms:

• Uneven enforcement: Land being a ‘state’ subject, the use of planning and control regulation are different across the country. Lack of uniform procedures hamper lending and investment.
• Siloed record keeping: makes it difficult to find a single source of truth on all financial, locational and legal issues related to a parcel of land.
• Presumptive Titling: as oppose to ‘conclusive titling’ leads to illegal land transactions as not all contract-based transactions are registered.

• A person paying the tax is presumed to be the owner under presumptive titling.

• Opaque market transaction: through circle rates which are often not updated leading to the state loses on stamp duty and registration charges.

Exemplary initiative taken towards land reforms: 

• Title Cards: providing guarantee ownership records to property owners as a part of The Urban Property Ownership Records initiative of Karnataka.

• Digital Land Records Modernisation Programme: launched with the aim of digitizing and modernizing land records and create a centralised land records management system.

• SWAMITVA Yojana: Survey of Villages and Mapping with Improvised technology in Village Areas (SWAMITVA) Yojana has been launched by Centre to map rural inhabited areas using drones.

Conclusion: Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. Covid provides an opportunity to land reforms.