The ongoing land survey for cleaning of agricultural land records and account for the actual land in cultivation has been helpful on two counts.
First, those who were unable to update the land records even after making umpteen rounds, are now happy to get the records updated and rectified at their doorstep without feeling harassed or having to grease any palms.
Second, the beneficiary is the government itself. It will have clarity eventually when the exercise is completed by year-end on the actual extent of land under cultivation to release input assistance of ₹8,000 per acre from next year. In many villages close to urban areas, agricultural land has been converted into real estate ventures without any change in the revenue records.
“The exercise will result in targeted, systematic disbursement of input assistance only to the land under cultivation,” said official sources.
Time-taking
The land re-survey is a comprehensive and time taking exercise to be done in two phases. In the ongoing first phase started from September 15 and to be completed by December-end, focus is on land records rectification, updating and simplification in a transparent manner through gram sabhas.
The names of dead pattadars in the records were being removed and replaced by the names of legal heirs after verification in the gram sabhas. People are happy with this smooth transfer which had been pending for years. Division of property within the family peacefully where no court cases were pending, correction of survey numbers in the records after verification of land on the ground with mutual consent in the gram sabhas and recording of ‘Sada Bainama’ (transactions on plain paper) were being taken up.
Taking stock
The exercise has been helpful in taking stock of assigned lands in the villages as assigned lands cannot be alienated by the beneficiaries to others.
The exercise, however, is not for tenant farmers but to record the land ownership as the lands mostly belonged to absentee landlords. “Though the input assistance will be given to land owner, in the new socio-political reality, the terms of tenancy will also change to give better share in the yield to the tenant farmers or land owner may bear the expenditure for seeds and fertilisers,” sources said.
Project lands
The lands acquired for various public and community projects but still in the name of pattadars were being updated with the names of schools, temples, post office, sub-stations in villages.
Sources said that in every village, 70 to 80 % of records had no issues, two to three % were in legal disputes and remaining 15 to 20 % were being rectified as per the latest ownership after inviting objections in the gram sabhas. In most of the villages, first gram sabhas were already held for preliminary verification and in the second gram sabha, names would be read out.
At present two teams were on job for each mandal.
