Even for the correction of a simple spelling mistake in a land record, a poor farmer will have to make rounds to the local revenue offices several times and yet end up with no permanent solution in sight.
In some cases, not all the land of the farmers spread over different survey numbers will not be entered in the online entries of the ‘webland.ap.gov.in’, which belongs to the Revenue Department of the AP government and managed by the Chief Commissioner of Land Administration (CCLA).
Such instances of erroneous records leave the farmers and their families clueless at the time of getting government benefits and also during transfer of property titles at the registration offices where they are being asked for clean online revenue records.
All these long-standing problems have been mostly brushed aside as ‘not serious’ till District Collector R. Mutyala Raju and Joint Collector A.Md. Intiyaz decided to take a look. To their surprise, they found that there were nearly 10 lakh land records that were flawed all over the district.
Even more astonishing was the fact that a third of these flawed records were found to be those with the names of the farmers misspelt or their survey numbers not properly entered.
Apparently, the village and mandal level staff has been taking the uneducated, helpless farmers for a ride till now in the absence of a possible close monitoring by the district-level officials and also partly because of the interference of people’s representatives at different levels in such seemingly simple matters.
To change everything for better, the officials have brought in the Purification and Updation of Revenue Entries (PURE) software, which is purely a district-level software developed by the district IT officials with the objective of enabling the District Collector, Joint Collector and the Revenue Divisional Officers to place a daily watch on the progress of land records purification exercise. Not a part of the ‘webland.ap.gov.in’ website, the PURE software is an important preliminary exercise that makes village revenue officers and tahsildars totally accountable in all the stages prior to making corrections in the final entries in the AP webland official site.
First stage
The first stage of the PURE exercise has already been completed at Gudur, which is one of the places where the new software is introduced as a pilot project.
“There are 3.5 lakh records all over that could be purified with minor corrections in spellings and names. This can be done at the level of VROs and tehsildars. With the District Collector’s approval, these corrections will be made suo motu,” said Gudur RDO P. Arun Babu.
Under this PURE exercise, land related grievances are categorised into four types. Firstly, they require minor corrections in spellings. Secondly, approval of the Joint Collector is needed. Thirdly, a survey has to be done and, fourthly, where courts’ orders are involved.
