The Uttar Pradesh government's ‘Bhulekh' project also known as ‘Digital Land' has won gold in the national e-governance award for 2018-19. The award was given away by Union Minister Jitendra Singh to senior government officials from the UP revenue department, board of revenue and National Informatics Centre, Lucknow.
The project was launched by the Uttar Pradesh Revenue Board with the help of state NIC to digitised land records and offer them via web portal to the public, so that they can check land ownership related information such as ‘Khatauni' or ‘RoRs' (Records of Rights) online.
This project also formed a foundation for successful implementation of PM Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana under which Rs 2,000 was directly transferred to the accounts of more than one crore farmers in the state by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on February 24.
During the peak period (on 13-2-2019), the portal received more than 5.30 crore hits in a single day. The national gold award-2018-19 for e-governance was presented to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath by a Revenue department team in Lucknow on Thursday.
Uttar Pradesh has 18 divisions, 75 districts and 350 tehsils spread across 2.35 crore hectare land area, divided into 1,08,848 revenue villages with 7.65 crore plots. Currently, the dispute among these plot owners and their records were being maintained manually. This gave rise to manipulations, corruption and land scams as large number of cases of data manipulation at the level of junior tehsildar were being reported. Currently over 8 lakh revenue court cases are filed across 2486 revenue courts in the state.
To overcome this challenge, the state government decided to launched an integrated platform. Under this project, land records have been digitised and a web portal has been created where all the land ownership related information such as ‘Khatauni' or ‘RoRs' (Records of Rights) are being provided online. Now, anybody can obtain a digitally signed copy of RoR from tehsil. These services are also being made available through Common Service Centre (CSC) on payment of nominal fee. According to senior government officials, over 2 crore digitally signed copies of RoR has already been issued.
A 16 digit unique codes have been assigned to each and every plot except for villages under consolidation or survey, like a Aadhaar number. Any buyer or entrepreneur can check online about the ownership of the plot and also whether the plot of land he proposes to buy is under litigation or mortgaged or previously sold.
Illegal sale or purchase of non-transferable land such as Patta land, Talab, Pasture, Gaon Sabha land, among others may be checked at registry level as well as mutation level. The system has an easy to generate list of ponds, pasture land, public land for allotment or for planning purposes for creating public infrastructure.
According to government officials, this has eliminated manipulation, cheating and improved transparency. Also, the number of cases in revenue courts are likely to go down as most of them were related to small land disputes.
