Revenue department is the oldest of departments. It is synonymous with land and maintenance of records of the same thereof. Land is divided into various categories depending on the use it is put to. Some of the categories are Agricultural, Non-agriculture, Banjri jaded, Bangri Qadeem, etc. The department maintains the records of these distinct types of land category-wise. Jamabandis, Girdawaris, Mutation registers and Fardi portal are well heard of. People throng tehsil offices to get the documents or information related to their land holdings. The basic soldier of revenue department, Patwari, maintains and updates these records, thereby making it available for reference to the government and the general public.
Jamabandi is an essential document which contains all the information of various categories of land along with different survey numbers. A survey number is a fixed number given to a fixed piece of land during settlement in an estate. Reading of Jamabandi register is a very specialised task and requires a vast knowledge and expertise, thereby rendering it a forte of few skilled revenue officials.
Jamabandi is also called “Char Sala”, meaning it is written and re-written after a time period of four years. The mutations attested from the preparing of previous Jamabandi of an estate are incorporated in the Remarks column of that Jamabandi with red ink, as these entries become more prominent, and entries in the Khanakast are tallied with the current Girdawari. Jamabandi Form has twelve columns where each column depicts unique information.
Most of these Jamabandis were prepared in the year 1969-71 before the commencement of the Agrarian Reforms Act. Then, after a gap of twenty years new Jamabandis were prepared in all estates of the erstwhile state of J&K. The process continued till 1999. The then officials compiled these Jamabandis but most of them were left unchecked and remain without the signatures of attesting authorities. This unattested record gave birth to litigations on the one hand and, on the other hand, left scope for embezzlement.
Again after a gap of almost thirty years, Land Records Information System was launched in the year 2017 entitled ‘Aap Ki Zameen Aap Ki Nigrani’ under the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme. Under ‘Digital India’ mission, various initiatives were taken across sectors to digitise records. Same was done with zeal and enthusiasm by the Jammu and Kashmir administration. The already available land records were scanned by the revenue department in collaboration with Ram Tech company.
This marks a complete transition from offline to online. Now people can check the records of their land online from anywhere. This has decreased rush in Central and District Record Rooms and Tehsil Offices.
The information of land records, especially recently prepared Jamabandis, is made available to people online, thereby making access easy. Before digitisation the manual processing was tedious. By digitising new Jamabandis, transparency and fairness will be achieved. It will also help the revenue department to shift workforce and attention towards other urgent issues, for instance, Settlement.
Recently digitised Jamabandis are well documented and would hence boost revenue departments’ digital footprint and audience.
As already mentioned, Jamabandis are reviewed and updated after every four years. However, this prescription was not followed in the past and hence most of these were not in line with the current ground reality. The changes in title and interests of the estate coming into the notice of revenue department were not reflected in these Jamabandis when these were subject to reverification at Regional Director Land Records Office. Now these Jamabandis were reverified at RDLR Office and were cross-checked by patwaris to minimise errors.
It was ordered that before final digitisation the scanned printouts shall be handed over to revenue authorities at the Tehsil level and will be read before Zamindars for cross-check of entries in Khanna Milkiyat, Khanna Kasht, Survey number, area involved and essentially updation of mutations.
Before digitising any record, it is important on the part of the authorities concerned to have widespread consultation with different stakeholders. In this case of Jamabandis, taking Zamindars and land-owners onboard along with Chowkidars and Lumberdars would help verify the entries.
India is mostly a rural country. People are not aware of e-services as the digital divide is high. Wrong entries in Jamabandis would give rise to endless worries for these rural folks. It would make them run from pillar to post to get their record corrected and consequently would render them vulnerable and helpless. This is so because once the government is over with any project, the onus lies on people to get mistakes in their records corrected. This is exactly what happened in Tamil Nadu where digitisation was riddled with mass errors. The complainants, to whom the obligation to get their names etc corrected had shifted, found it absolutely difficult and cumbersome. So, to their rescue an order was issued by Tamil Nadu government which called for extensive exercise to correct the details.
What should follow completion of digitisation is a convenient means to get wrong entries, if any, corrected.

The writer is In charge, District Record Room Anantnag

Mohd Amin Mir