SVAMITVA (Survey of Villages and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas) Scheme is a Central Sector scheme launched on National Panchayat Day i.e. 24th April 2020 aimed at “providing ‘record of rights’ to village household owners possessing houses in inhabited rural areas in villages and issuance of property cards to the property owners.
Nodal Ministry:
The Ministry of Panchayati Raj (MoPR) is the Nodal Ministry for implementation of the scheme.
• In the States, the Revenue Department / Land Records Department is the Nodal Department which will implement the scheme with support of State Panchayati Raj Department.
• Survey of India shall work as the technology partner for implementation.
Objective of the scheme:
The scheme aims to provide an integrated property validation solution for rural India.
• It envisages demarcating “rural abadi areas’ by using Drone Surveying technology.
• The project aims for creation of survey infrastructure and GIS maps that can be leveraged by any department for their use.
• It aims to support in preparation of better-quality Gram Panchayat Development Plan (GPDP) by making use of GIS maps.
Generation of Property Cards:
The multi-stage process of generating a property card begins with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Survey of India (SoI) and respective state governments.
Once the MOU is done, a Continuously Operating Reference System (CORS) is established which provides a virtual base station that allows access to long-range highaccuracy Network RTK (Real-Time Kinematic) corrections.
Significance of the Scheme:
• Monetization of the Property: The scheme would enable them to use their property as a financial asset for taking loans and other financial benefits from Bank.
• Improved Centre-State Collaboration: The model has a structure where the centre takes the responsibility of being the nodal authority and then functions after consultation with the revenue departments of the state governments taking the help of the state panchayati raj depts.
• Increasing revenue to state government: By determination of property tax with the help of GPS directly in States will add to the State exchequer.
• Efficient planning in rural areas: Mapping of rural areas will provide enough material to rural planners to plan infrastructure development in those regions.
• Further, land entitlements to original owners will help in rapid acquisition of land for public infrastructure development.
• Reduces dispute related to land titles: Currently, a large number pending cases in different level of courts across country is related to land titles.
• Ownership certificates to owners of land will reduce such cases and thus burden on courts will automatically reduce.
Challenges in the Scheme Implementation:
• Access to Data: To what extent the data collected will be shared with various layers of government and state departments.
• To what extent the data will be monetised or should be monetised.
• The private sector companies that are offering the drones for surveillance and data collection, will the data be shared with these companies too or not.
Data Protection: India, still as a country is far away from having a proper fool-proof data protection laws and without such law in place, collection of data and its misuse will always remain a challenge for such an ambitious scheme.
Bringing Maximum Villages under Surveillance within Projected Time: Issues with bringing the villages under surveillance is a challenge as the pace of bringing villages under coverage cannot be pushed to increase after a certain point.
SWAMITVA scheme is a path breaking scheme which has the ability to tame multiple discrepancies simultaneously.
It will on the one hand sort out issues pertaining to land acquisition and title rights while on the other hand will sort problems in judiciary due to pendency of large number of cases.