In southern India, it takes a village to update tattered land records

KONGARAGIDDA, INDIA // Poorly educated and simply poor, Kanasari Veeraswami lived in fear of losing the smallholding his father had left him because he had no way of proving he owned the four-acre plot of land left to him by his father in the southern Indian state of Telengana.

Local government officials would not accept the sheaf of faded, handwritten documents he had, so he would not receive government subsidies to grow his crops.

“I couldn’t even get bank loans, and had to borrow only from the moneylender at very high rates of interest,” said Mr Veeraswami, 60.

His is not an uncommon problem. According to government data, about 56 per cent of rural households in India are landless. In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, the figure is two-thirds. Telengana state, where Mr Veeraswami’s village of Kongaragidda is located, was carved out of Andhra Pradesh two years ago. It is estimated at least half its rural households are landless.

Even those who own land often do not have the documents to prove it. Official data is also patchy. Land surveys are supposed to be carried out at least every 30 years, but the last survey in Andhra Pradesh was in the 1940s, said Sunil Kumar, state director at Landesa, a land rights advocacy body.

“A person can only be considered a landowner when he has a title deed with his name, when his name is in the state land records, and he has physical possession of the land,” he said.

“But most people are unaware of their rights, of how to use the law, or they have tried and failed and given up,” he said.

Landesa has identified 75 potential problems related to land ownership in rural areas and most households have at least four of them, ranging from errors in the title deed to boundary disputes and encroaching government land.

Of the 105 families in Kongaragidda village, most are indigenous people who have long been discriminated against and deprived of land. Only about 10 per cent have all the documents for the land they cultivate, Mr Kumar said.

Poor farmers like Mr Veeraswami are often harassed by local officials who demand a bribe to correct or issue new documents, he said. Their only other alternative is to go to the court.

Matters related to land and property make up about two-thirds of all civil cases in India, according to a study by Bengaluru-based Daksh, a non-profit group that campaigns for better governance. Most litigants are poor men belonging to so-called lower castes, with only basic education.

But Telengana state now trains college-educated young people from villages as paralegals to provide basic assistance in land matters.

In addition, Landesa trains three people as community workers in each village – always including a farmer and a woman – to conduct surveys, verify records, mark boundaries and help with documentation.

“Initially, they were reluctant to share information — maybe they thought we were going to take away their land,” said Usha Ram, a community worker in neighbouring Kannayapally village. “Now that they understand the importance of updating records and having their names on the title deeds, they don’t want to leave even an inch of land unregistered.”

Like the rest of India, Telengana is rushing to digitise land records as part of the national land records modernisation programme. With a budget of 56 billion rupees ($841 million), it should have been completed this year but that has been postponed until 2021 with the budget doubled to 110bn rupees. But it’s not merely a question of transferring old manual records, but ensuring those records are accurate, which entails door-to-door surveys and physical verification of boundaries by the community workers.

In the Telengana villages surveyed so far, Landesa found that well over half the existing records were inaccurate, said Mr Kumar. “This is why involvement of the community is key: you can ensure that the records are accurate because the community is aware and is involved,” he said.

Small discrepancies can be fixed in a few days, and most matters settled in a village council meeting, this avoiding lengthy legal action. Mapping the land with new GPS hand-held GPS devices will also speed things up. Government officials have backed the community-led effort, updating records and issuing new titles quickly, said Mr Kumar.

After a decade of uncertainty, Mr Veeraswami will finally get a title with his own name on it.

“It has taken a long time, but now I don’t have to worry about losing my land or getting my dues,” he said.

* Thomson Reuters Foundation