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Bankable Property A Way to Economic Empowerment of Villages
from जमींन से जायदाद तक
26 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
As 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 conventional 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
A bird's eye view of Umrala village of Uttar Pradesh. The digital map prepared under the SVAMITVA project using UAV/Drone.
MISSING TARGET
GoI’s ambitious target to map and provide property cards to residents of 6.62 lakh villages by 2024. But numbers show a different story.
Drone Survey villages 1,25, 679
Maps Handed Over to State 91,032
Source: Ministry of Panchayati Raj
Maps provided for Enquiry 49,205
Card distributed 27,206
Villagers also have records of their agricultural fields, which are maintained and updated by the state’s revenue department because they are a primary source of tax revenue.
"In North Indian states, these agricultural field records are popularly called Khatauni," says Saini. "Now a new term, Gharauni, has been coined for the house records.”
Earlier, before SVAMITVA, rural houses were separated based on common understanding between neighbors. Villagers usually erected small stones or grew trees to demarcate their housing and land. However, these methods were frequently marred by disputes. Now, under SVAMITVA, the villagers are given accurate housing land records, which not only reduce property-related disputes but are also supposed to help villagers buy and sell property and get bank loans. This will, in the future, also help local governments make comprehensive village development plans.
How the surveys are conducted
To start a drone survey, some groundwork is required. With the help of local sanitation workers, government officials put a one-foot wide lime (chuna) powder strip around the designated border of a village, based on maps from the 1960s. This border is officially called 'lal-dora' and it circles the land that is formally inhabited by the villagers. This survey does not take into
Ram Prasad Saini (Right), Junior Land Revenue Officer, shows the final map of Umrala village, Khurja block, UP, prepared under SVAMITVA scheme. account the houses/inhabitants outside the designated lal-dora boundary. Next, a drone is used to conduct an aerial survey from a height of approximately 400 ft. Later, the local officials receive a map for ground-truthing. Based on their feedback, a final map is released and after that the villagers receive the documents related to their housing rights.
Lagging behind target
Today, drone technology has drastically reduced the time taken by manual mapping and surveying. However, on the ground, the implementing agencies are facing a shortage of manpower to meet deadlines.
Saini too, faced a huge staff shortage to finish executing his task. He took up the job of visiting all 300 homes in village Umrala by foot over a period of two months, writing the owners' names on each verified roof on the map (in consultation with the villagers), completing ground surveys, finalizing documents with geo-tagging, and distributing them among all the households in the village. He was actually responsible for a total of eight villages that had been surveyed by drones already. But, although he finished his work in Umrala on time, the other eight villages are still pending.
The SVAMITVA project was launched in April 2020, with the aim of finishing the survey by 2024 and providing the final property rights documents to all rural households by March of the year. In the current financial year 2021/2022, about 2.3 lakh villages in 16 states were targeted with an outlay of Rs. 200 crore. But, according to the government website, only
1.13 lakh villages have been surveyed ((see 'Missing Target') till now and the residents of over 27,000 villages have received property documents.
"If we cannot provide help (more manpower) on the ground, this deadline will keep extending," says a senior officer, who oversees the implementation of the project, on the condition of anonymity.
Also, there is a lesser availability of drones. Government procured only 300 long endurance drones – capable of staying in air for 1.5 hours, covering up to 5 km of area and producing high spatial level of resolution –from Roorkee-based company Ansari Precision Instruments Private Limited, a part of the Roter Group of Companies.
“Government requires around 2500-3000 such long endurance drones to achieve its target by 2024” says Sajid Mukhtar, Chairman, Roter Group of Companies.
Other challenges
Several villagers living outside the lal dora boundaries have complained about their habitats not being included in the surveying and documentation process of SVAMITVA.
According to Saini, this is because only the land inside the lal dora boundary was never documented; the land outside has already been documented by the land revenue department of Uttar Pradesh.
“The land outside the lal dora is either the community pond, land used for grazing cattle, or agricultural land that is already occupied
by families and recorded with the government,” he says.
The union government has made the Ministry of Panachayati Raj (MoPR) the nodal ministry to implement the project. But MoPR lacks competency in land related subjects. Keeping this in mind, the Uttar Pradesh Government pressed the Land Revenue Department into service to lead the project. It made the survey more precise and almost dispute-free. But this is not the case in other states, such as Haryana. The Department of Panchayati Raj in the Haryana Government has been carrying out the task but it is marred by many anomalies and disputes.
Disputes emerging
Over 200 km north of the national capital, people at Devan village of Hisar district in Haryana are agitated over the survey. They say the drone surveys have generated wrong coordinates of the residents' homes, as well as those of other village infrastructure and roads.
"How has the ownership of homes been given to people who live 200 meters away," says a visibly agitated 52-year-old Rajbir Singh, head of a family of 10 members. "This has happened not only to my house but those of several others too,” he says. In addition, a common street in his village has been shown to be a private property and other pathways are shown to be going through people’s homes.
The Chandigarh-based regional center of the Surveyor General of India’s office, which conducted the survey with drones, blames the groundtruthing committee instead of the technology.
"I do not think technical mistakes were made; we used a high-quality drone system with a high precision level from," says Prashant Kumar, a Deputy Surveyor General at Survey of India who was responsible for overseeing the work in Haryana. According to him, Survey of India used a professional survey
Rajbir Singh, 52, of Devan village, Hisar, Haryana, raises his concern over faulty survey and poor grievance redressal mechanism
Ramveer Singh, 70, in Nangla Mohiuddinpur, Uttar Pradesh, holds his 'Record of Rights' document given under SVAMITVA scheme after drone survey
grade UAV/drone-based system fitted with Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and optical sensors, with all accessories and software.
"It is possible that either the lime powder patchwork was not done properly or the groundtruthing committee did not work in consultation with the villagers," he adds.
Local officials claim these technical mistakes are being addressed at different levels. However, the affected villagers claim the rectification process is taking long, and is expensive and cumbersome.
Local government officials of the District Panchayati Raj department say such cases are small in number. However, a senior officer has a different take on it. Priyanka Soni, Deputy Commissioner of Hisar, says they have solved over 900 such disputes. "The project is new and we are trying to set up a fast grievance redressal mechanism. There are some gaps that will be fulfilled in the coming times," she says.
The ground-truthing is executed by a six-member team made up of two revenue department officials, the village secretary, Panchayati Raj Department officer, and two social activists. This committee has to verify everything before the final tagging of the house owner.
Question of legal validity and sustainability
The SVAMITVA document provided to inhabitants gives them a confirmation of their ownership and a feeling of pride, especially to those who don't have other financial support systems except their homes. Every household that our team spoke with was desirous of getting a bank loan based on the property documents. However, the documents lack legal validity as of now because banks do not treat them as authentic. The reason for this is that whatever is being done under this project is legally not binding. The Government has asked state governments (as land is a state subject) to make laws to give these documents legal sanctity.
One of the main objectives of the SVAMITVA scheme is to monetize these housing properties and trigger an economic revolution in rural India. But banks have a different take on it. Our team spoke to a loan aspirant who wants to start his own business but the bank is refusing to give him a loan.
"This is not a surface property that we cannot seize in case of loan default," says Anil Siwach, State Bank of India manager in Hisar district. "The property's map should be approved by an authority like Haryana Urban Development Authority," he says.
Since the SVAMITVA project has no legal validity, the objective of the project to trigger economic activity in rural areas through loans or property transactions, may not be realised.
“There is a lack of a clear roadmap as to how to go ahead from this point and what the villagers will actually do with this document,” says a senior officer engaged in the implementation of the project in Haryana who did not wish to be identified.
Sirsi village in the Karnal district of Haryana is the first village in the country where the pilot project for SVAMITVA was done in 2020. It was a non-starter.
“Nothing has happened since the people received their property documents in Sirsi village. It is unreasonable to expect help from us” says B S Chahal, District Development and Panchayat Officer, Hisar district.
Conclusion
The project seems well-intentioned and promising in terms of both improving land administration and opening rural land markets. But the question remains whether this project will realize its true potential in helping bridge the rural-urban economic divide, which has emerged in the past three decades after the adoption of the economic liberalization policy.
