Bihar land drives head for deadline miss as strikes cripple revenue machinery

Bihar's digitization efforts for land records are stalling due to strikes by key officers, leaving over 46 lakh applications pending and affecting farmers.

The Bihar government’s high-profile push to digitise and clean up land records is collapsing under its own weight. Two flagship campaigns — Bhu-Mapi Mahaaviyan and Rajaswa Mahabhiyan — that were supposed to wrap up by March 31 are now staring at a certain miss, with the very officers meant to drive them either on strike or ready to join one any day.

Bihar land drives head for deadline miss as strikes cripple revenue machinery

Circle officers (COs) and revenue officers (ROs), the backbone of ground-level execution, have been on indefinite mass leave since March 9. On top of that, the state’s 1,000-plus government amins (land surveyors) affiliated with the Bihar Rajaswa Ameen Sangh (BRAS) have announced a day-long dharna on Monday and warned of indefinite mass leave if their long-pending demands are not met.

The amins want time-bound promotions, a better pay scale, support staff and extra perks for the extra work they have been doing. In a memorandum sent to the principal secretary of the revenue and land reforms department, BRAS leaders reminded the government that the then additional chief secretary had personally promised last year to look into these issues. “Nothing happened,” they said bluntly.

A senior IAS officer in the department did not mince words: “Without the land surveyors, nothing moves on the ground. Both Bhu-Mapi (uploading fresh survey records on the portal) and Rajaswa Mahabhiyan (correction of records and mutation of land) will come to a grinding halt if the amins also walk out.”

The damage is already visible. The drive to correct faulty land records and process mutations has slowed to a crawl ever since COs and ROs stopped work. More than 46 lakh applications for correction and mutation are lying pending across the state. Every day the strike continues, the backlog only grows.

Deputy chief minister Vijay Kumar Sinha, who also holds the revenue portfolio, has taken a hard line — handing over CO charges to block development officers and repeatedly reviewing progress in review meetings. Retired circle officer Masood Hasan, who spent decades in the department, called the approach unrealistic. “Setting targets and reviewing them every fortnight is fine on paper, but execution on the ground is what actually matters,” he said.

Even a parallel campaign — Agri-Stack, run jointly by the agriculture and revenue departments — has taken a heavy hit. The scheme was meant to give every farmer a digital identity card so they could avail central and state benefits. So far, only 30-35 per cent of the state’s farmers have received their cards.

The fallout is reaching farmers’ fields in real time. Untimely rains and hailstorms in the past few days have devastated standing wheat, maize and lentil crops in several districts. The revenue department’s circle officers are the nodal officers for assessing crop loss and finalising compensation. With most COs on leave, the process has stalled.

A senior agriculture department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “We have asked district magistrates to send crop-loss reports and designate suitable officers as nodal points. But the reality is that without the regular COs, things are moving at a snail’s pace.”

A retired professor of Patna University Nand Kishore Chaudhary said the irony is hard to miss. “Bihar has been trying for years to bring transparency and speed into its creaky land administration — a sector notorious for disputes, delays and corruption. The two drives were billed as game-changers. Instead, they have become a textbook case of how industrial action by the very people who run the system can derail even the best-intentioned plans,” he added.

As of now, the government is yet to respond formally to the amins’ fresh ultimatum. With Monday’s dharna looming and the March 31 deadline just nine days away, the revenue department finds itself racing against time — and its own striking workforce.