Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Oct 8: In a bid to convert their “dead capital” into assets to access credit and improve their own financial conditions in rural India, the prime minister Narendra Modi will hand over physical copies of property title deeds to a selected few on Sunday officially marking the inauguration of his “Svamvita” project to end property disputes in the rural areas in the country.
The official sources familiar with the “Svamvita” project, which was launched by Modi on April 24, said around 132,000 land owners across 763 villages in the country would receive from the prime minister the physical copies of the property titles of their homes and the surrounding areas they own, and not just the cultivable land as was the practice so far. They would also be handed over digital property cards in keeping with the modern technology.
House owners from 763 villages would include 221 from Haryana, two from Karnataka, 100 from Maharashtra, 44 from Madhya Pradesh, 346 from Uttar Pradesh and 50 from Uttarakhand, the sources said. The project mark a significant land ownership reform that could improve the finances of rural property-owners and also end property disputes that have gone on for years, sometimes decades.
The title deeds could be leveraged by their holders as financial assets for loans and would also help keep a record of properties mapped by drones in the rural areas, since no such records existed currently. Under the “Svamvita” project, the mapping with the help of drones of the rural properties in the “abadi” (populated) areas in all the 6.40 lakh villages in the country was expected to be completed by 2024.
The sources said the objective of the project was to provide an integrated asset verification solution for rural India. The land of the residents in rural abadi areas would be demarcated using the latest survey methods using drones and with the help of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, State Revenue Departments and the Survey of India. This would not only enable village household owners to use their homes as a collateral for loans but also cut down on costly rural litigation.
The local representatives of the revenue department and representatives of other allied departments would prepare a record of the ownership of the people in the presence of the inhabitants. Along with this, a detailed arrangement had been set in place for on the spot settlement of disputes at the time of mapping, if necessary, the sources said.
The sources clarified that the genesis of the problem of lingering property disputes in the rural India lie in the British regime. Since the very beginning, the villages of India had been the backbone of its economy because “Malgujari” or land revenue was the main source of the state income. When the British took over the reins of governance in India, they inherited a land record system established over centuries but limited only to the revenue-generating areas.
As their sole objective was to collect as much land revenue from tenants as possible, the British established the “Zamindari” system in many parts of the country and the so-called “ryotwari” system in the remaining parts. While the ownership of the cultivated land and their measurement maps were prepared, the British government did not make any effort to measure the populated area of the village nor did they try to determine the ownership of residents in those populated areas because they did not earn any revenue for the exchequer. “This was not done as there was no land revenue to be collected from the abadi area. Unfortunately even after independence, no effort was made to either demarcate the abadi land or create ownership rights there,” the sources said.
Due to the absence of any kind of ownership records or demarcation of abadi land, whenever any dispute arose regarding possession, drainage, or boundaries, the parties have to go to a civil court for settlement of disputes, a lengthy process that sometimes transcends generations. The sources point out that of the total number of cases pending in the civil courts in the country, at least 40% were only related to the disputes concerning the abadi land in rural areas.