Land mafia scanner: UP villages to get GPS-enabled border pillars

Yogi govt collaborates with IIT Kanpur, Geological Survey to demarcate all 109,000 revenue villages in the state

In an effort to advance its on-going anti-land mafia drive, the Uttar Pradesh government has partnered with Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K) for installing GPS enabled border pillars to demarcate all the revenue villages in the state.
There are about 109,000 revenue villages in UP and about 850,000 border pillars are installed on village boundaries.
 
The Yogi Adityanath government has drawn up a blueprint to install GPS devices on these border pillars for exact demarcation of the village boundaries, UP Board of Revenue chairman Pravir Kumar told Business Standard.
 
“We are working with IIT Kanpur, Remote Sensing Applications Centre, UP and the Geological Survey of India (GSI) for the coding of these border pillars. The model of the pillar has already been designed and is in the process of being finalised,” he informed.

 

The GPS enabled border pillars would map the exact latitude and longitude of these villages for future reference, records and facilitating transactions, which would effectively prevent tampering with the records for possible forgeries and fraudulent sale deeds.
 
“This would help us wipe off almost 3-4 lakh land-related cases currently pending in the various revenue courts of the state,” he added.
 
At the same time, the Board is already working towards allocating a unique code to individual plots in the state. The unique code would need to be quoted in land transfers or sale deeds.

“The digitisation of land and revenue records is the most effective tool with regards to the anti-bhu mafia (anti-land mafia) campaign being spearheaded by the state government,” Kumar underlined.

 
Currently, over 700,000 revenue court cases are pending at about 2333 revenue courts in the state at the naib tehsildar, tehsildar, collector, commissioner and Board of Revenue levels. The Board has also created a Revenue Court case Computerised Management System (RCCMS), which is accessible to officials as well as people for transparency.
 
“During the course of digitisation, we have detected over 2,000 fraudulent and unscrupulous land transfers and sales deeds, where gram sabha land, ponds or landmarks for performing last rites have been sold or transferred. The total acreage of such land runs into thousands of acres and we can safely presume this is just the tip of the iceberg,” he added.

 
Although, the anti-land mafia campaign is a coordinated effort by the various government departments, the officials portal is being managed by the Board, he added.
 
“Of the about 89,000 rural land maps, about 58,000 maps have already been linked with physical records,” he added.
 
In fact, the speedy progress made by the UP Board of Revenue in its digitisation process has not only earned it plaudits from the Centre, but several state governments like Bihar, Goa, Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand have also sought its cooperation for implementing it in their respective provinces.