A report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India tabled in the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly points to various deficiencies in the management of land records in the State, including an incident wherein login credentials were misused to illegally transfer 79 acres of government land to individuals in Kodaikanal in 2018-19.
The performance audit on land records management in Tamil Nadu (covering the period from 2016-21) stated that four Revenue Department officials misused the key password assigned to the RDO, Kodaikanal and transferred 32 hectares of land (about 79 acres) of government lands in 103 sub-divisions in Kodaikanal town between October 2018 and June 2019.
Though the government maintained that the classification of the lands involved have been restored to their original classification viz., ‘Government’ and that these lands were blocked for further land transactions, an audit in October 2021 found that in one instance the land parcel was not blocked and in three instances, though the land parcels were blocked, the name of the individual to whom the lands were transferred illegally continued to be displayed.
Differences in land area in manual and computerised records
One of the other principal findings in the report was that in 61% of the sampled villages, there were significant differences in the total land area of the village, between the manual and computerised A-Register. Over 3.22 lakh private land parcels were erroneously classified as government land in the computerised land records resulting in the private land owners not being able to transact their land in TamilNilam.
In one instance, as multiple patta numbers were assigned to the same land owner, all the land holdings of an individual in a village cannot be ascertained, the report said. Despite integrating the data between Registration and Revenue Departments, 49% of Online Patta Transfer applications (not involving sub-division) were rejected, resulting in citizens applying for OPT again through Common Service Centres.
“Deficiencies in data security resulted in transfer/classification of government land as private land. The Department does not have a Disaster Recovery system in place to safeguard the critical data of TamilNilam,” the report said.
In the absence of Aadhaar seeding in the land records database, the system did not have a provision to uniquely identify land owners, it said. “Monitoring at all levels, especially at the district level, were deficient. In the three sampled districts, the monitoring committees did not meet even once.”
