The New Waves of Land Administrative Reforms in India: Are we missing the Wood for the Trees?

The New Waves of Land Administrative Reforms in India:

Are we missing the Wood for the Trees?

The shift towards enhancing efficiency and ease of doing business ushered in the 1990s with the liberalization marks a paradigm shift in land governance in India. From social justice and farm-focused reforms that characterized the post-independent nation-building from the 1960s, the land bandwagon conspicuously changed track towards an economic growth agenda, leaving the redistributive reform unfinished. The new goalposts were set in the form of efficient service delivery to land owners, conclusive land titling and making land available for more profitable uses, aiming at expansion of the land market.

Post a hiatus at the turn of the Century, when inclusive land tenure reform had again become the focus of land governance paradigms, with Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, Forest Rights Act, 2006 and the Right to Fair Compensation and, Transparency in Land

Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 (RFCTLARR Act, 2013) were brought in to improve women's land rights, rights of tribals on forest land and compensation on acquisition of land, the market bandwagon is back on track empowered with new technologies and actors, resetting the land administration structure and functions.

Fresh legal designs in land policy, highlighting this transition are now evident in ongoing and much-talked-about land administration projects viz. Odisha’s Slum Dwellers’ Land Rights and the SVAMITVA Scheme. Touted as the much-needed “land reforms,” they showcase different intended tenure security outcomes, mostly around individual and national economic impacts. Yet, we argue that they remain more as limited “land administrative reforms”.

While the land reform of the 1960s’ was an end in itself in terms of land governance agenda, this new land (administration) reform seems more like a means. Failure to appreciate this difference, we show, can lead to externalities (negative unintended consequences) undermining the goal towards inclusive tenure security that is critical for societal well-being as well as for resilient and inclusive growth.

Administratively, these new instruments reflect three changes: structural, legal and technological, often argued by the protagonists as innovations. We see the design challenges in each one of them are due to an obsession with speed and scale and not efficacy and inclusion.

Structurally, the land administration function is being shifted to new departments while the traditional land revenue departments/functionaries (like tehsildars, collectors, sub-registrars etc.) have been side-lined or less involved. For example, Panchayati Raj Department oversees rural property cards under SVAMITVA, the Tribal Department coordinates forest rights recognition and the Urban Development Department in Odisha administers titles on slum lands. These agencies involve local governance institutions like Village Panchayats, Gram Sabha or Slum Dwellers’ association, respectively with different degrees of decentralisation in the land administration process.

While such an extension of land administration and decentralisation is laudable, the problem is, it has been done in a half-baked manner. The focus has been on the speed of delivering land administration services and not the result. Departments like Panchayati raj, tribal welfare or urban development lack the expertise, capacity and legitimacy to administer, verify and allot titles, apart from being heavily burdened with their departmental task, quite often. They generally outsource survey, documentation and land administration processes to non-government actors, with limited capacity, experience, accountability and legitimacy. While private sector drone fliers or geospatial technology providers have taken up major responsibility in Odisha’s Slum Dwellers’ Land Rights scheme and SVAMITVA scheme, NGOs have been helping communities in mapping forest rights. While they may have expertise in the technical domains, their limited understanding of and exposure to tenure and survey processes have resulted in prolonged delays and the incidence of several errors causing distrust and exacerbating exclusion. A major consequence is that banks continue to disregard the newly issued land documents as collateral. Dispute resolution over a wrong entry in the new records has also not been easy nor locally accessible.

Legally, the new titling documents do not carry the validity one expects. In India, property titles are presumptive, and therefore titling is complex. That is why, documents like ‘Record of Right’ (RoR) are issued after a lengthy process in itself, which has its own grammar of paperwork, multi-layered vetting and other time-consuming verifications. Since they are issued involving mandated actors like settlement officers, tehsildars and registrars, they carry a historic legitimacy.

The present policy design, however, wants to focus on speed. Here, instead of fast-tracking issuance and updating the record of rights(which is difficult surely), the new schemes have introduced a set of intermediate tenure documents, like Rural Property Card (RPC) in SVAMITVA, or Land Registration Certificates (LRC) for slum dwellers, prepared and issued by new intermediaries. These quick fixes have not ensured the desired legitimacy in the new land records issued under these schemes. Banks still do not recognize the RPCs or LRCs, and worse, the title holder is now expected to pay property tax (for SVAMITVA).

Often implemented in haste to achieve targets, they bypass the due diligence processes and thereby risk the exclusion of poor, women, Dalits and tribal, who lack power and remain on other sides of the awareness divide. While procedurally these intermediate records should end up being integrated with the Record of Rights, the process for such integration is often slow and neglected. Such progress, surprisingly, does not form part of the performance indicators of these new actors. The complexity of land laws, legacy records and legal pluralism, which are embedded characteristics of India’s land tenure governance, remain under-appreciated by these new actors, hence, resulting in new externalities, tedious processes, unachieved outcomes, after some initial euphoria and success.

Technologically, exclusions are becoming normal. There is a widespread assumption in land reform policymaking that technology brings in land reforms quickly. But the reality is different. For the private firm engaged in surveying and record digitization, the focus always remains on the measurable outcome. So, announcing that 80% of the cadastral survey was done in 6 months is a mark of progress. That it leaves the last 20% on the other side of the technology divide, outside the proposed benefits, is hardly considered a concern. Also, whether the 80% achieved, has ensured the accurate measurements and recorded the tenure correctly, reflecting the ground situation, is often contested.

These exclusions can be brutally unethical. These firms also often leave out contested areas and disputed properties from land mapping to avoid delays. But mapping was most needed for these parcels. In other words, technology risks failing exactly for those groups whose inclusion was the very reason technology was brought in. Land reforms are pivoted on last-mile connectivity, and unless everyone is included, the legitimacy and purpose of the entire exercise remain in doubt.

The bottom line is simple – land administrative reforms done for the sake of speed are failing in actual land reforms which are done for the sake of justice. This does not mean that speedy justice cannot be done. But it has to be done in an integrative manner. Bypassing slow parts of the machine is not enough – the new parts must be made compatible with the overall design.

Land reforms in general, and in these interventions, have been argued with three economic purposes – protection (or fair compensation) from eviction, access to public entitlement viz. Prime Minister Awas Yojna for slum dwellers, farm subsidies for forest rights holders etc., and the ability to sell or mortgage the property to derive economic return and market participation. While to some extent, relevant provisions in RFCTLARR Act, 2013, address evictions vis-à-vis forest rights holders, such provisions are missing around other new tenures. In the case of entitlements – forest rights and slum dwellers’ rights have been partially effective. For FRA farm subsidies have come in for a few cases where it has been only integrated with RoR (viz for PM Kisan), while PMAY benefits allude LRC holders, got rights over an area which is less than 30 sqm area. Against the intended benefit, the use of the land title as capital has however, remained unfulfilled in almost all cases of frenzied land administration reforms that government is overzealously undertaking, so far. Financial institutions are not doling out loans to people on intermediary tenure documents.

This is therefore a classic example of missing the woods for the trees. Underlying this enormous policy agenda is an obsession with hurry and an assumption that once the administration is made efficient, everything will fall into place. This may be true in other domains, but not in land. After all the policy-tectonic shifts, the cost is that we may end up far away from where we wanted to be.

Land reforms are imperative for inclusive growth and shared prosperity. If a 5-20 year due diligence process is to be compressed into 1-4 years technology-efficient, crashes will be inevitable. The real worry is if we can afford those crashes. More importantly, to avoid a crash, we don’t want to steer away from our goals. The last thing people want is a land document which adds no utility.

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Authors:

Mr. Pranab R Chaudhary founded and leads Center for land Governance, which seeks to enrich and expand land governance space through partnerships, networking and evidence building. As a researcher and consultant, trained in natural resources management and governance, he has more than 25 years of experience working with inter-sectoral development actors across South Asia. Through his engagements cutting across research, pilot actions and capacity building he has been exploring inclusive land tenure and local livelihood solutions, that work for people and planet. Pranab regularly writes research and media articles, lectures at different institutions and advises Indian and global institutions on inter-disciplinary issues connecting land tenure with development and environment.

Mr. Yugank Goyal is associate professor in public policy at FLAME University in Pune. He has founded the Centre for Knowledge Alternatives which is pioneering the documentation of data and cultures across Indian districts. He has published in a range of high impact international journals as well as opinion pieces in popular dailies, on several of his research interests, including governance, institutional economics, informal markets, knowledge production and psephology. He has authored the book, 'Who Moved My Vote: Digging through Indian Electoral Data'.