Bihar survey to identify landless households begins in end of April: Official

Revenue minister Alok Kumar Mehta, who has held several review meetings on the landless household survey, has stressed the grand alliance government’s commitment to provide land to all landless families

PATNA: The Bihar government will launch a survey later this month for the identification of landless families among the state’s poorest, a senior government official said on Monday, adding that the survey will continue till June 30.

Jai Singh, secretary of Bihar’s revenue and land reforms department. holding monthly review meeting (Twitter/BiharRevenue)

“The survey will be comprehensive and identify the families in the poorest sections among the different categories, as laid down by the government, are still landless. It will be a detailed study,” said Jai Singh, secretary of Bihar’s revenue and land reforms department.

The survey will be conducted via a special application that will be formally launched on April 25.

Singh said the revenue officials, who will carry out the survey, will also seek information on the status of land given to the landless farmers earlier following complaints that some of them sold the land given to them by the government to private people.

“We are taking such details from families this time so that cases of irregularities such as beneficiaries selling land received from the government to other persons could be checked,” Singh said.

Revenue minister Alok Kumar Mehta, who has held several review meetings on the survey, has stressed on multiple occasions the commitment of the grand alliance government to provide land to all landless families in the state and update the land records.

Bihar last conducted a survey of landless households in 2014. The government gives land to landless families from 3 to 5 decimal in different categories including scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and backward classes.

Officials said there were 24,000 households identified during the 2014 survey who should have been given land by now. They said the process to provide homestead land to them by December this year has been initiated. “We have to give land to the landless households who are on the waiting list on priority… There is a plan to settle families in clusters depending on the availability of land or in units of one or two in different areas,” Singh added.

Data updation and land survey

The revenue department has accelerated the process of updating land records and fast-tracked the appointment of 10,000 new revenue officials including amin, or a land measurer.

Officials said the 2.70 crore pages of different land records have been digitised and work is going on digitising major land record-related documents such as Khatiyan, jamabandi (number allotted to raiyats in tenants’ ledger for paying rent against land holdings) in all districts.

“Major land records are being digitised on priority so that they cannot be tampered with. The rest of the documents are also being digitised in a systematic manner,” said another official in the revenue department.

Meanwhile, officials said the land survey work is already at an advanced stage in 89 circles spread over 20 districts and would be completed in the next two years. The land survey work is the first such survey to update land records. The last cadastral survey, a process to ascertain land boundaries through manual survey, was held in 1911, during British rule. Over the past 100 years, a few revisional surveys have been conducted.