India's Move To E-Governance Exposes Ancient System Flaws

The Bhoomi (or 'land') e-governance project was launched in Karnataka, India in 2001 (click here for a Programme Description). This article examines the strategies that have informed the development of the project, and evaluates its progress and problems.

As part of Bhoomi, the revenue department has computerised the state's 20 million rural land records, involving some 6.7 million farmers. Central to the project is the computerised system of producing a Record of Rights Tenancy & Crops (RTC), which is an identity paper that farmers need in order to obtain bank loans or settle land disputes. The new system also revamped the process of tracking 'mutations', which record changes in land ownership. Under the old system, 9,000 Village Accountants (VA) were responsible for maintaining land records. According to the author, some landowners bribed VAs to change the titles of poor farmers' lands to include their names - making the mutations "an instrument for rural corruption, exploitation and oppression". Now mutations can only be approved by the head of a taluk (a sub-district-level administrative unit) in the revenue department, and the farmer has to be present for his or her record to be changed. In order to access either an RTC or a mutation record, a farmer visits the "e-kiosk" in the main town of a taluk. (In addition to a printer and modem, each kiosk has 2 computers that store landowners' names, history of land ownership, and details about the land). The farmer hands an application to the kiosk clerk, who keys in the request and gives the print-out to the farmer after checking his or her identity.

As the author explains, Bhoomi has been plagued by problems related to "the vast inequities that cut across the social, economic and cultural spectrum of India". An e-governance expert based at Britain's Manchester University comments that "At present, IT is reinforcing more than attacking inequality: men are benefiting more than women; the rich are benefiting more than the poor."

Here is a summary of some of these problems, as detailed in the article:

• Bhoomi organisers allowed fraudulent land records to go online. One official notes that in one district in north Karnataka, 32 farmers' lands had been recorded in the VA's name prior to computerisation. That VA sold the lots just before Bhoomi began. "The administration has just hurried this through and India has lost an opportunity to replicate Bhoomi as an instrument of equity", he says.
• Although the federal government has asked all states to emulate Bhoomi, Panos Features found that in the field, former VAs are still being used for verifying mutations and other tasks.
• Ironically, while Bhoomi aims to help the poor, they appear to be struggling most with the new system. "We spend Rs. 10 ($0.2) as bus fare to reach the town from our villages and pay Rs. 15 ($0.3) for an RTC. Sometimes it takes two days because the queue is so long. The VA was better," says one farmer. Another complained, "I am illiterate. Who will help me fill up the application form [for the RTC] here?"
• Bhoomi fails to address gender inequality. It has traditionally been men in India who own land (in Karnataka women own just 12% of the land). Women in Dharwad district do not know of the new system. Those from Kalakawatagi village in northern Karnataka say they have not seen their computerised RTC, issued free by the revenue department in 2001 for personal verification. In Kolar Dsitrict, a leader of some 200 women's groups comments that "taluk officials themselves know little of the system and are in no position to even begin helping the women. They need training."

Rajeev Chawla (Bhoomi's pragmatic designer, Revenue Director, and Karnataka's first e-secretary) dismisses these problems as "organisational flaps that can be corrected. What I want is someone to challenge me in Bhoomi's [technical] design - to show it won't work." Commenting on the illiteracy and gender issues, he says, "IT cannot be held responsible for solving all of India's problems."

Click here for the full article on the Panos site.

Source

Article forwarded to the bytesforall_readers list server on July 30 2003 (click here to access the archives).