The Survey of Villages Abadi and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas, or Svamitva project, which was launched in April 2020, has the potential to play a critical role in establishing safe ownership rights for rural India. The initiative intends to provide an integrated property verification fix for rural India by deploying drones to demarcate occupied zones. It tries to build precise land and property records by supplying a Record of Rights (RoRs) to rural household owners in populated rural areas, which can be vital to minimizing property-related conflicts and enabling commercialization of rural residential assets for credit facilities. It also envisions increased tax collection through Panchayati raj organizations by offering clear records of land ownership. As of March 2021, drone surveys in over 31,000 villages had been completed, and property cards had been handed to around 230,000 property owners in 2,626 communities.
Critical Analysis
SVAMITVA scheme's legal, social, and economic architecture requires further consideration.
Legal
The property cards given under the plan requires legal validity for the citizens to establish their title, and use it to avail banking services. The Framework for Svamitva Scheme’s implementation also places an obligation for enacting suitable revenue law adjustments for this purpose on the different state revenue departments. As these departments implement the necessary modifications, a rigorous examination of the applicable laws will ensure that no legal flaws impair their efficacy.
For example: In Haryana, the Svamitva plan has been implemented under Section 26 of the Panchayati Raj Act. The ambiguity that rises with this fact is that, Section 26 of the of the Panchayati Raj Act only enables the panchayat to make maps of the said region, not to form the corresponding RoRs. In this instance, panchayats may not be the appropriate authorities to complete the process of transferring property titles to rural residents. As a result, if the legal procedure is not followed, there is a risk of a disagreement. To avoid such anomalies, a study of state land and revenue legislation affecting the legitimacy of property cards should be conducted. These specialists could be charged with amending existing laws or creating new ones in order to establish legally admissible property cards.
Social
Independent women constitute a sizable proportion of the population, yet they are frequently landless. The plan makes it possible to recognize women's rights of ownership because it awards property cards based on "possession" rather than "inherited wealth." To achieve this, governments can consider inserting information on more than one owner on property cards, as well as recognizing women's shared ownership of property.
Financial & Economical
Svamita's end purpose is twofold: one is to provide property records to rural households so that their homes can gain incremental benefits as investments which could be used in exchanges and as leverage for obtaining credit facilities. Enabling property commercialization is critical in the aftermath of the continuing coronavirus pandemic's economic misery. The other is to increase the economic resources available to rural local governments by broadening the tax base.
Considering the degree of flexibility with which governments might execute this scheme, it is critical to assess the scheme's results in terms of desired results. Creating an appropriate monitoring system is critical in this regard. Finally, its success will be measured by the extent to which a thorough and reliable property record has been generated with a system to upgrade it instantaneously, the accessibility of information in a transparent manner, the convenience of inclusion with gram panchayat-maintained property tax registers, the establishment of official ownership contributing to higher access to formal credit, and so on. These particulars will have to be recorded by the states.
Conclusion
The Svamitva scheme has the ability to harness the potential of land in populated regions of villages. The system may also aid in the prevention of property conflicts in the times to come. However, unless significant efforts are taken to ensure that it is integrated in the customary custodian of agricultural land registry, it may wind up as paperwork with no permanent value. Furthermore, To guarantee that Svamitva achieves its goal of creating monetarily robust state authorities, legal modifications are necessary to allow panchayats to gather and use property tax. To ensure reliable and comprehensive revenue collection, gram panchayats could also be entitled to modify property tax records at the time of land record modifications.
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