जमींन से जायदाद तक

GROUND REPORTING

BANKABLE PROPERTY

A WAY TO ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OF VILLAGES The Indian government's ambitious scheme, SVAMITVA, can be better termed as 'Zameen se Jaydaad tak'. The scheme using drone and surveying technology to map habitations and provide 'Record of Rights' to village residents across the country to trigger economic activities. Our Geospatial Artha team traveled to the hinterland of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh to take stock of the ground situation.

By Jitendra Choubey

A

s he moves his index finger over a white paper chart depicting granular images of irregular-sized housing roofs, curved streets, and community infrastructure, Ram Prasad Saini, a junior officer in the Uttar Pradesh State Revenue Department, claims what he is showing us are images of Umrala village in the Khurja block of Uttar Pradesh.

This village, located about 100 km east of Delhi, is where he says he first completed his survey and distributed housing ownership certificates to 300 residents under SVAMITVA — Survey of Villages (Abadi) and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas, the Government’s flagship land reform scheme. The SVAMITVA scheme is to provide rural people with the right to document their residential properties so that they can use their property for economic purposes.

“It is a huge task but drone technology has simplified the complex job of measuring the boundaries of every household,” says Saini. Trained in the conven-

GEOSPATIAL ARTHA Volume 01 » ISSUE 01

tional methods of land measurement, he says he was surprised by the quality of the drone images available now.

"Drone technology is so precise that it leaves no space for human manipulation; we peacefully executed our groundtruthing work based on the map supplied by Survey of India The images are quite persuasive and helped the villagers identify their own places, roofs, walls, and streets. Drones have replaced the conventional surveying methods of chain and tape, which would have otherwise made the task slow and tedious," adds Saini.

Pioneering work The surveys are part of India's ambitious rural land reform project, SVAMITVA. Prime Minister Modi has called it one of India’s biggest land reform missions since Independence. Launched in April 2020, it aims at providing clear ownership of property to people inhabiting rural (Abadi) areas so that every homeowner in a village gets his/her own housing record document.

Photos: Gaurav Kaushik

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