On January 18, Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued 65 lakh property cards to residents of more than 50,000 villages across India.
On the occasion, he said, “Our government through the Svamitava yojna has made the people of our villages so capable that it can completely transform Indian rural life.”
The Svamitva scheme was launched in 2020, and aimed to use drones to map inhabited rural areas in the country. The government sought to use the records thus generated to issue property cards to residents of villages, many of whom had no documents to prove ownership over their land.
But as Vaishnavi Rathore and Nolina Minj found, reporting from Delhi, Gujarat and Jharkhand, Modi’s boastful claims are not borne out by the experiences of those who live in rural India. In village after village, individuals explained that the process had been opaque and inefficient. And the records thus generated were riddled with errors – in Delhi’s Shikarpur, for instance, a living owner had been recorded as deceased.
They found, also, that the scheme has frequently failed to take into account the varied nature of land-ownership and use in the country, including by communities and families.
“Working on this story from three states gave a great insight into how national, uniform policies interact with people with such variations regionally,” Rathore said. “It was also interesting to see the different relationships that communities have with lands – something that our land policies do not reflect.”
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