SWAMITVA: RURAL PROPERTY CARDS
Shishupal Singh, a resident of Arimal Yayi Tipu village in Kanpur Dehat in eastern Uttar Pradesh, has just heard of the Centre’s new Swamitva scheme, which will allot property cards to every house in the village. Excited because he feels the value of their houses will go up, he is sure banks too will start looking at villagers with new interest. Shishupal, whose wife is the gram pradhan, says houses in the village carry little value now as there are no proper records (land records now are kept by the ‘family register’ at the panchayat office, a phenomenon peculiar to the state). He’s hoping the system will change with the Centre’s new initiative.
The Swamitva scheme, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Panchayati Raj Diwas—April 24—has a mammoth plan in the works: to use the latest drone model survey to map every rural property in the 662,000 villages of the country over the next four years. Once the survey and legalities are taken care of, owners will be issued a property card with a house number. The pilot phase this year (2020-21) plans to cover over 100,000 villages in six states.
The panchayati raj ministry will coordinate the scheme’s progress along with the Survey of India and the panchayati raj and revenue departments of various states. According to the Centre, the Swamitva scheme will unlock the benefits of owning rural properties. Apart from market appreciation, the property cards would stand as collateral for loans or advances from banks and financial institutions. An accurate survey of the properties will also help the gram panchayats offer better civic services, besides enabling them to collect property taxes in the future. For the states, the survey maps will be of immense use in preparing future development schemes.
The maps will be prepared by the Survey of India with the assistance of the revenue and panchayati raj departments of states. The Surveyor General of India, Lt Gen. (retd) Girish Kumar, says the drone survey will produce state-of-the-art HD photographs. Every house will be shown with its measurements, including total area, covered area, etc. Kumar says the village maps, prepared on a scale of 500:1, will be so comprehensive with topography and street details—and a resolution accuracy of up to 10 cm—that they will be unlike anything that has been done before. He says even India’s cities have not been mapped on this scale.
Agricultural economist Tazamul Haque, who headed the panel that conceived the Model Land Leasing Act, says the rural property card was long overdue. He feels the scheme could solve many of the long-pending property disputes in villages besides giving an identity to residential property in rural areas. Data accruing from the exercise could also be linked to digitised data on land in the villages, he says.
But first, the states will have to sign MoUs with the Survey of India. Demarcation of properties on the ground will be done by the villagers, gram panchayats and state revenue departments. The Survey of India and state agencies will then determine open common lands, government lands, gram sabha lands and land owned by villagers. After the survey is done, the state government will issue a notification to establish ownership rights. Any objections over these rights will be investigated by an officer of the revenue department. After approval by the defence ministry, the Survey of India will hand over the maps to the Centre and the concerned state departments. The property cards will be issued by the state authorities.
The task ahead looks clear-cut, but in the villages, many will tell you that there are complications. In states like Madhya Pradesh, villagers have no records of their residential properties.
AN ACCURATE SURVEY OF THE LAND WILL HELP GRAM PANCHAYATS OFFER BETTER CIVIC SERVICES
In cases where a house is shared by siblings, everyone will want to have a separate property card. Apart from this, villages have a complex structure. There are adjacent houses and courtyards, people pass freely through each other’s lands. All this will pose new challenges once titles become an issue.
MP Sarpanch Sangathan president Somesh Gupta has even more serious concerns. He worries that land-grabbers could have a field day if the property card comes through. As it is, there are no property records, and many transactions are for houses on illegal land. The property card scheme could legitimise many of these deals. Gupta also says it will be very hard to identify rightful owners of houses in rural MP as there are no records at the gram panchayats.
Ramanand Goel, a former president of the Ghaziabad Tehsil Bar Association, fears a spike in legal cases. The kutumb (family) register in UP contains names of every member in a family, enough reason for litigation when it comes to whose name will appear on the property card.
The problem also stems from the fact that land surveys have not been done in India for decades now. Surveyor General Kumar recalls that the last survey in Haryana was some 50 years ago. The situation is not too different in other states.
Shishupal Singh, who is otherwise optimistic about the card, admits to a few other issues. For one, with the number of families increasing, houses are already shown as divided into parts with residents in the voter list as occupants of A,B or C section of it. The lekhpal (village clerk) in UP does maintain a map of the residential area, but the houses are bought and sold without any record. If a piece of land lies unoccupied in the residential area, it is shown as barren and not entered in the khatauni (an abstract that lists all holdings of an individual or family). In some cases, a registered sale deed for houses may exist, but even that is not evidence of title of the said property.
Supreme Court advocate Ashwini Upadhyay highlights the complex way villages are structured to poke holes in the Centre’s plan. He feels rural properties should be linked to Aadhaar cards. At the moment, only those who are leaving for good sell their houses in the villages. They sell their lands and often the value of their houses is included in the price as there is no record of housing properties in rural areas. “Right now, there is litigation even on the issue of tethering buffaloes. Determining property titles in the extremely dense villages of UP won’t be easy either,” he says.
Advocate Ramanand Goel points to another vexing issue—village politics. The pradhans will surely try to promote their henchmen. Panchayat politics anyway divides villagers in a big way; this could become one more reason.
Besides, each geographical zone will have its own peculiar problems associated with the measurement of assets by drones. Illegal encroachments are a problem in MP while UP has been evacuating illegal occupants. There will also be problems for specific communities, like the tribals in MP who live in villages on the city’s outskirts. They have no proof to even establish their identity. On a positive note, experts say the property card plan could help the government identify people who have amassed huge properties in rural areas. ■