By March 2022, the Union government intends to assign a 14-digit unique ID number for land parcels in the country. According to a report in The Hindu, the government will integrate its land records database with revenue and bank records, as well as Aadhaar numbers, on a voluntary basis, according to a Parliamentary standing committee report submitted to the Lok Sabha last week.
The Department of Land Resources told the Standing Committee on Rural Development that the Unique Land Parcel Identification Number (ULPIN) scheme has been launched in ten states this year and will be rolled out across the country by March 2022. Therefore it can be expected that there will be a unique ID for all plots of land by March 2022.
Benefits
As per The Hindu’s report, one anonymous department official described it as “the Aadhaar for land,” a number that would uniquely identify every surveyed parcel of land and prevent land fraud, especially in rural India’s hinterlands, where land records are often outdated and disputed. According to a presentation the Department made to States in September 2020, the identification will be based on the longitude and latitude coordinates of the land parcel and will be contingent on detailed surveys and geo-referenced cadastral maps.
Extension of DILRMP
As reported by the Hindu this is the next phase of the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (DILRMP), which started in 2008 and has been expanded several times as the scale of the project has grown. It was set to end next week, but the Department has proposed extending it until 2023-24 to meet its original goals and widen its scope with a slew of new initiatives.
“This Department has taken new initiatives under the scheme, such as NGDRS [National Generic Document Registration System], ULPIN, linking of the court to land records, incorporation [of] consent-based Aadhaar number with land records, and so on,” the Department told the panel.
Costs of the project
In the Department’s presentation to the parliamentary panel, it stated that linking Aadhaar with land records via ULPIN would cost ₹3 per record, with seeding and authentication of landowner Aadhaar data costing ₹5 each. It went on to say that the Aadhaar numbers would be merged with the land record database voluntarily.
It would cost 50 lakh per district to build a modern land record space while integrating land records with the Revenue Court Management System would cost 270 crores. The next step of the DILRMP would include “linkage of land record databases with banks,” according to the study.
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