Hyderabad: The government is attempting to clean up land records with a Rs 500-crore project to put an end to land disputes and prevent corruption in wrongful registration of land.
In the next three months, the government has lined up a digital mapping of land using the Digital Global Positioning System (DGPS) and the LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology to prepare high resolution maps. The government uses LiDAR to build irrigation projects with pinpoint accuracy.
Aerial survey of lands will be done using helicopters equipped with DGPS. Simultaneously, revenue officials will take up a conventional land survey by physically visiting all the sites with the village as a unit.
In this, the government is following the Bihar and Gujarat models. After the aerial survey, revised land maps would be prepared by comparing the data with old land records and the revenue officials’ survey will decide the ownership and boundaries of a property.
All the details will be posted online and will be accessible to the public. Digital pictures of each parcel of land with its boundaries will be posted online.
Digitised pattadar passbooks similar to the passports with enhanced security features will be issued to land owners soon after, giving no scope for creating fake passbooks or manipulating details later.
These new passbooks will be sent to the land owners only by post like the passport. Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has been conducting a series of meetings with revenue officials at Pragathi Bhavan for the past three weeks to finalise the measures to cleanse land records and find a permanent solution to land disputes.
Deputy CM Mohd Mahmood Ali, who holds the revenue portfolio, said, “The increasing number of land disputes and encroachments are the result of erroneous land records. They have not been filtered for over eight decades. The CM is keen on putting an end to this menace.”
He said the Chief Minister was ready to spend more than Rs 500 crore for the project, and the revenue department had been given the go-ahead.
“We will use the latest technology available globally to set the right revenue records even if it costs more,” he said.
Mr Ali said that the revenue department had begun a pilot project in a few villages in Ranga Reddy and Medak districts to work out the nitty-gritties of conducting such a survey on a massive scale.
