Five states to replicate project Bhoomi

Kerala, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal are replicating Karnataka's

'Bhoomi' - a land reform project, in their respective territories. Apart from these five states that have come up with their

formal consents, another 12 states have indicated keenness, R Chandrashekhar, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Communications and IT, informs

CNS. However, it is uncertain how the change of guards at the top would affect the fate of the same.

It may be recalled that Pramod Mahajan, former union minister for parliamentary affairs, communication and IT, had

sanctioned the cost of replicating the best practices of the Karnataka 'Bhoomi' project in any one

district in all the 28 states and union territories of the country. 

There was a clause that once the rollout begins, the digitization of land records will have to be over by the next three years. But

that particular clause has been removed keeping in mind the forthcoming elections.

"E-governance should be an apolitical issue," Mahajan had asserted in a meeting where all the state IT departments were represented, a month ago. 

Chandrashekhar informed that though a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) as such has not been signed between the

Union and the state governments to the same effect, under the circumstances it would not be a necessary

precondition.



"There are four well-defined stages that the states will have to go through - a complete migration to digitization of records, allÂ
manual systems replaced by computers, a G2C (government to citizen) portal, and break-even and sustenance of projects by moderate usage charges,"

Chandrashekhar elaborates. 

Bhoomi is the self-sustainable e-governance project for the computerized delivery of 20 million rural land records in Karnataka

to 6.7 million farmers through 177 Government owned kiosks. 

SUDARSHANA BANERJEE



NEW DELHI (CNS)