Karnataka farmers will receive SMS alert on progress of land transaction

When 35-year-old Gowramma gave her thumb impression for the online registration of her land in the sub-registrar office of Tumkur on Friday, Karnataka stepped into another chapter in e-governance. Afterwards, Gowramma received an SMS alert on her mobile phone from the revenue department stating that her land transaction deal has gone through.

This happened after the revenue department launched its online integration of Bhoomi (online delivery of rural land records) and Kaveri (Karnataka valuation and e-registration) software on Friday. The project was initiated by revenue minister G Karunakara Reddy in Tumkur. The integration is now done in 25 taluks in phase I and will gradually be extended to all 176 taluks across the state. The integration is aimed at reducing the hardships for farmers.

“The sale transactions will now take place only if the land is identified with a specific survey number. The name of the seller and the extent of transaction will be made available on a database, which the farmers will have access to. This will ensure that there will no fraudulent or bogus transactions in the future,” said the revenue minister.

Once the sale is done, Bhoomi will start mutation process almost on the same day without any data entry of sale transactions, officials said.

“The manual data entry and procedures with the present system takes a lot of time, and the integration system would reduce time consumption by 50%,” said secretary of revenue department (Bhoomi and UPOR) Rajeev Chawla. Now farmers will get an SMS alert in both English and Kannada on all stages of the mutation process.

“All these days, farmers were running from pillar to post to know the status. Now, an SMS alert will be sent to farmers whenever a land transaction is initiated,” he said.

The farmers have to register their mobile numbers with the revenue department or taluk office. Congress leader and MLA from Shira in Tumkur, TB Jayachandra, said that the department should also concentrate on resolving existing problems with the Bhoomi system.

“There are many errors in land records, which the farmers are fed up with. This needs to be addressed,” he said. Reddy said that there was a shortage of surveyors in the state, which is hampering the land transactions. “We will soon recruit 2,000 surveyors to resolve the issue,” he said.