From 1st June, 2019 onwards, an INR 346 crores-worth land survey project will be undertaken in Maharashtra, across 1.20 lakh hectares and 40,000 villages, in consonance with the state government’s aim to extend ownership rights to around 15 million rural households in the state. This exercise will take place over three years, with the help of drones, mounted with high-resolution cameras. Out of the total project cost, INR 75 crores will be allocated for the drones and supporting equipment.
Using drones is cheaper and faster than traditional instruments like the Electronic Total Stations (ETS), which is used to establish the boundaries and maps for landowners. Using ETS would take 30 years to complete the same project. Drones will enable the coverage of two villages daily and the process will be completed in three years. These drones will be procured by the Survey of India to survey the lands. The images will be processed and the data will be handed over to the office of the Settlement Commissioner.
This project is being heralded as the largest survey exercise in modern India, aimed at providing villagers with security of tenure, for the land they live on, pay taxes for, but have no titles since the land has never been surveyed. Before this, in 2008, India undertook a massive land record modernization programme to survey lands, upgrade records and establish ownership. However, many areas in India have not been mapped in the last century.
Since Independence, only 3,000 villages have been surveyed in Maharashtra. After a pilot project in 2018, the Maharashtra state government had issued nearly 400 title deeds in one month, based on verifications from the tax records of the villagers. Disputed and competing claims were settled by the village councils. The process of digitalizing nearly 270 million land records has almost been completed in Maharashtra.
The accordance of the land’s titles will serve multiple purposes. The villagers will be able to use them to get loans from banks and will benefit from potential increases in land prices. The gram panchayats will be able to maintain accurate property registers. The survey’s data of larger villages, being transformed into towns and cities, can be used for preparing development plans. The idle land will be identified and excess land will be reserved for housing purposes. The government will also be able to bridge data gaps to improve the process of according land rights.
Agricultural land was first surveyed in India, pre-Independence, by the British government, in order to assess the land revenues across the country, barring the North-Eastern region. Only those villages were surveyed, which were populated by more than 2,000 people. Rocky land parcels and infertile lands (unfit for cultivation) were excluded from the survey, due to the lack of revenue streams from them. These pieces of land were considered “wasteland”, fit for only the construction of houses and were not surveyed holistically. However, today, these rocky lands have monetary value for the landowners.
The Maharashtra government is in the process of using drones for other forms of administrative and development surveillance as well. These include tracking the levels of flood waters, providing a bird’s eye view of industrial estates to investors and so on. The use of drones is an example of how digital tools can be used for the documentation and analysis of land and resource rights information. However, only time will tell whether the applications of drones are being used purely for veiled economic purposes or for larger goals of community welfare and development.
The image used is for representative purposes only.
India Outbound
March 27, 2019
source https://indiaoutbound.org/drones-based-land-survey-in-maharashtra/
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