Niti Aayog adopts UP's 'digital land' model for pan-India replication

Centre sets up technical steering paneleto study model, prepare by-laws; UP's system speeds up process of land sorting and analysis and supports faster resolution of land disputes and court cases

Federal think-tank Niti Aayog is considering recommending Uttar Pradesh's ‘digital land’ model to other states for digital record keeping and analysis.

Under the innovative model, the UP Revenue Board has allocated a unique code to each plot/land in all the 100,000-plus revenue villages in the state. These unique codes, akin to the Aadhaar number allocated to an individual, not only speed up the process of land sorting and analysis, but also support faster resolution of land disputes and court cases.

In fact, the department of land resources under the union ministry of rural development has already constituted a technical steering group to study UP’s model and prepare by-laws for circulation among the different states for replication.

The steering group consists of the Board of Revenue chairpersons of UP, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, apart from the chief secretary of Himachal Pradesh. Earlier, this week, the members of the group had arrived in the state capital to study the model in detail and talk to senior officials.

Besides, the Board has been asked by the Aayog to prepare a detailed report/case study to be circulated among all the states for replication, adoption and/or incorporation in their existing systems.

Recently, Board chairman Pravir Kumar had given a presentation to the Niti Aayog in New Delhi.

“I had given a presentation to the Niti Aayog about our digital land management and they were quite impressed. The Aayog is now mulling to recommend it to other states, so that the best practices in the land management could be adopted across the country and there is some uniformity in this regard,” he added.

Earlier, the UP Board of Revenue had been awarded the National Award for e-governance for 2018-19 for its digital land record innovation. It was feted for creating digitised land records across the state, which could be checked online as well.

“Land is a state subject and the Centre cannot make laws on it. Besides, there are so many variations with regards to land records and eEvery state has its unique set of problems and issues. Yet, the system of digitised land records can easily be incorporated with their existing systems for faster processing, sorting and analysis,” Kumar underlined.

So far, UP has integrated digital land records with court cases, public distribution system (PDS) and agriculture department.

“With the click of a button, we can generate the list of, for example, the number of water bodies or fodder land in UP. We can also generate the list of agricultural land based on the size of land holdings,” he informed adding the system was recently used for determining the beneficiaries under the flagship PM Kisan scheme, which had entitled small and marginal farmers with yearly payout of Rs 6,000.