Five states to replicate Bhoomi

Sudarshana Bannerjee

NEW DELHI: Kerala, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal are replicating Karnataka’s ‘Bhoomi’ land reform project in their respective territories. Apart from these five states that have come up with their formal consents, another twelve states have indicated their keenness to implement Bhoomi, R. Chandrashekhar, joint secretary, ministry of communications and information technology.






Former Communication and IT minister, Pramod Mahajan, had sanctioned that the center would bear the cost of replicating the best practices of the Karnataka ‘Bhoomi’ project in any one district in all the 28 states and union territories of the country. However, capital expenditure on infrastructure would have to be borne by the individual states.





"There was a clause that once the rollout begins, the digitization of land records will have to be over by the next three years. But this clause has been removed

R. Chandrashekhar, joint secretary, ministry of communications and information technology informed that though a MoU as such has not been signed between the Union and the State governments to the same effect, a MoU under the circumstances would not be a necessary precondition.






"There are four well-defined stages that the states will have to go through — a complete migration to digitization of records, all manual systems replaced by computers, a G2C (government to citizen) portal, and break-even and sustenance of projects by moderate usage charges," Chandrashekhar elaborates.





Bhoomi is the self-sustainable e-governance project for the computerized delivery of 20 million rural land records in Karnataka to 6.7 million farmers through 177 Government owned kiosks.