The Hindu : Satellite imagery to update land records

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Feb 19, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

Satellite imagery to update land records

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI, FEB. 18. To enable its officials to get relevant information on properties on their computers and to subsequently help the public in gaining quick access to this information, Delhi Development Authority has embarked on an ambitious Land Management Information System which with the help of satellite imagery and digitised maps would make life simpler for both its own staff and the people interacting with it.

A Global Information System-based application, this "multi-layer'' technology involves treating the land records, satellite imagery and available maps as different layers and then linking the images to the land records. The application is helpful in dealing with issues pertaining to enhanced compensation, court cases, and keeping track of records of acquisition and encroachments.

The Commissioner (Systems) of DDA, Sunil Sharma, said the development of the system involves scanning all the maps, vectorising and digitising them and keeping the commensurate details of the acquisition under Section 4 and 6 of the Land Acquisition Acts. To this end, the details of the khasra are also incorporated.

Mr Sharma said wherever the maps of a given area are not available or are in a very poor condition, the officials go through the "masave'', which are part of the village maps and are prepared at the time of "chakbandi'' (consolidation) of the property. Incidentally, during the course of the digitisation of the maps, the DDA officials working on the project realised that maps of about 60 of the 229 villages acquired by the Authority were either missing or were in a very poor shape.

However, that has not deterred the officials from going ahead with the project and they have so far digitised the maps of about 35 villages. For this, Mr Sharma said, the field books in the various administration offices are also being used to reconstruct the maps.

Work on another 150 villages is in progress and here the maps have been scanned and the data has been entered. "Now the process of integration of the pictorial form and the physical data is on to ensure that the total area of all the properties put together should match with the total area of a given region.'' While the technical part of the system is being dealt with by C-DAC, a company under the Ministry of Information Technology, for the purpose of coordination the reconstruction of the maps through interaction with the various departments, DDA has also roped in an experience consultant coordinator.

Hopeful that the exercise would ultimately help the officials access vital information on their computers - as at present no such facility is available.

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