PUNE: Maharashtra govt has selected 10 cities, including Baramati, Pandharpur and Bhusawal, for the Centre’s Rs5,000-crore urban land records digitisation project.
“Urban areas lack a record of rights and rely only on property tax and sale deed documents. The new system will provide clear property details or record of rights that will be updated on a dedicated portal,” deputy director of land records Rajendra Gole said on Friday.
Drone surveys for the project will begin in Dec-end and the actual work will start from Feb 2025. The state will receive Rs5 crore for the project in the initial phase. “By creating spatially enabled land records, we can resolve long-standing issues such as overlapping ownership claims, inconsistent land valuations, and boundary disputes,” Gole said, adding that the programme will expand to 400 more cities across the state after the pilot.
The cities selected for the pilot project in the state — Baramati, Pandharpur, Murtijapur, Buldhana, Rahata, Bhusawal, Ambernath (Thane), Khalapur (Raigad), Kannad and Chandrapur — will be covered under National geospatial Knowledge-based land Survey of urban Habitations (see graphic). Central government officials said while 100 cities were taken up this year, the aim is to complete the exercise in 4,900 cities in the next five years. “Urban areas lack a record of rights or 7/12 extracts and rely solely on property tax documents and sale deeds. This geospatial record of rights will provide a clear picture of property details in semi- and peri-urban areas, particularly in these census towns,” Gole said. “All records will be uploaded to a dedicated city survey portal, making them accessible through the City Survey Inquiry System,” he said.
An official said the initiative would help prevent fictitious sales through complete transparency. Moreover, civic bodies can discontinue their separate land use surveys as the data will be readily available. The initiative will help the disaster management department ensure identification of the floodlines.
The project would involve aerial photography with accurate GPS coordinates. “This will accelerate land survey, which will be useful in property tax assessment, better transport system, planning of drainage and flood management and preparation of master plans for our urban areas,” said a land survey official.
Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced the scheme in Budget 2024-25 to modernize urban land management systems and building on successful digitisation models implemented in rural areas through Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme, launched in 2008, and SVAMITVA scheme, launched in 2020.
