New Delhi: In a first-of-its-kind move to streamline land and property records in the national capital, drone surveys will be carried out to create digital records of land parcels along with ownership details, senior central government officials told ThePrint.
This is part of the Centre’s initiative to digitise land records in urban areas, which was announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Union Budget speech last month. The new initiative is in line with the BJP’s promise in its election manifesto to “undertake the creation of the Digital Urban Land Record System”.
While the Ministry of Rural Development’s land resources department has been tasked with digitisation of land records in urban areas across India, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) will be overseeing the process in the national capital, senior housing and urban affairs ministry officials told ThePrint.
The Delhi Development Authority (DDA), which is the main land-owning agency in the national capital, will be responsible for the development of digital land records. The land-owning agency Thursday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and Survey of India to carry out surveys of land using drones. An integrated geo-portal will also be developed where all land- and property-related information will be available.
The survey will be carried out within the next one to two years while the ground-truthing, which is to physically check the ownership of land, will take some time, sources in the Centre told ThePrint.
This is aimed at generating geo-spatial data of land records and infrastructure under various government agencies in Delhi.
The decision to conduct drone surveys was taken during a meeting chaired by Delhi Lieutenant Governor V. K. Saxena on 24 August after a trial was carried out by Survey of India over an area of 50 square kilometres.
According to senior DDA officials, while this will help in creating a database of land records along with the land titles after a detailed survey, it will also aid DDA and other government agencies in protecting their land from encroachment.
Currently, the land and property records in Delhi are maintained by the Delhi government’s revenue department. But there is no provision for maintaining digital land and property records, a senior DDA official told ThePrint.
“This will enable officers to visualise every drain, road, encroachment and even garbage on the ground and accordingly implement and monitor remedial measures,” a senior official with the Delhi LG office said in a statement.
Unlike rural areas, land and property record systems in most cities, including Delhi, are not updated due to several reasons such as manpower shortages, a multiplicity of authorities and areas frequently changing jurisdiction, among others.
The digitisation of land records in urban areas is being planned on the lines of two central government schemes—the Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme (DILRMP) and the Survey of Villages and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas (SVAMITVA) scheme—which are being implemented by the rural development and Panchayati Raj ministries.
After the successful implementation of these two schemes in rural areas, the Central government has been exploring ways to address the complex issue of urban land records since last year.
In June last year, NITI Aayog, the government’s apex policy think tank, had got approval from the MoHUA and the Ministry of Rural Development—which is implementing the DILRMP—to hold a consultation meeting with states and Union Territories to explore possible solutions to streamline urban land records.
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Drone survey to help prepare digital maps
The plan is that Survey of India will engage private firms to send drones to capture high resolution images of vacant and developed land parcels in Delhi.
This will be followed by demarcation of boundaries on each land parcel along with details about the owner. For this, the revenue department team will visit each area and physically check land records, according to senior DDA officials.
A senior DDA official said that this initiative will help in identifying encroachments. “It will help in getting real time data on encroachments, thereby prompting authorities to act against encroachments in the nascent stage itself.”
(Edited by Radifah Kabir)
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