INDIA-KARNATAKA: Another look at the much-admired Bhoomi project

M A S Rajan
I A S (Rtd)
Phone No. 3614523
Sadashivanagar P.O.
Bangalore 560080

Dear Fred Noronha,

As an attachment to this letter I send an Article titled Bhoomi under the
Lens , which looks at the much admired Bhoomi Project of the government of
Karnataka.

I hope you find it interesting and will be good enough to (i) kindly give me
your comments on it and (ii) publish it wherever you think
fit.

With warm regards.

M A S Rajan

By M A S Rajan

You would doubtless have seen recent news items on the Bhoomi Project in
Karnataka. (Click on Bhoomi in http://www.revdept.kar.nic.in for sumptuous
information on the Project.) Much praise has been heaped on it, rightly so.
It has won recognition in overseas forums, expectedly so. It is a marvelous
effort and deserves the kudos. It has been noticed as a pioneering effort at
crossing the 'digital divide'. There is a good chance that the whole scheme
will be replicated in other States of the country.

Some 20 crore rupees (in other words, Rs 200 million -FN) have been spent on
the Bhoomi Project. As the news reports say the Project is a
government-to-citizen service, to give a copy of the RTC, a
much-sought-after extract from the official land register, targeted on
landowners and other local land-related interests. The service, rendered
through dedicated Kiosks, yields a fee revenue of about a crore and quarter
rupees annually. Delighted with the success of the Kiosks the Government is,
one hears, planning to mine the 'content' imbedded in the computers of the
Project to bring out -- to begin with -- localized crop estimates for sale
to the interested customers. The Revenue Department has more dreams: banks
and lending institutions would be linked to the land information database;
so would the courts, High Court down to Taluk Courts, to provide instant
data for their adjudications; and so on.

In this author's opinion a feature of Bhoomi that mightily contributes to
its success is that it is an inward looking, localized facility used by and
useful to, the village folk, which gives it a positive shine. The people in
the rural areas saw the system as devised for and working for them rather
than as some Govt. show, some official device intended to give them some
unknown, remote benefits. Furthermore the system's product went to every
nook and corner of the State, and served vast numbers of individuals in the
rural area, regardless of level of literacy. More than anything the Project
satisfied a long-felt need.  Until it came along, getting the RTC from the
Village Accountant was a time consuming penance, and getting one that was
up-to-date, very chancy. Bhoomi was a magical replacement.

The content of the system which gives Bhoomi so much value, was not
something that could be loaded up by the flick of a switch. Its creation was
costly in terms of time and manpower. The tasks began with the digitization
of the 'heritage' records, which required not only data entry of enormous
volume but R & D for firmware (in Kannada) to handle the data. At every
stage the built-in operations and formats of the Bhoomi software had to
checked with the Department and conundrums solved pragmatically. The content
required several years of intensely coordinated work.

The Bhoomi project has cost a pretty paisa and this is typical of
computer-assisted ventures of large size. Clearly, in any reckoning of
priorities for investment of Government money on IT in the rural area,
Bhoomi deservedly came on top of the scale. It was a wise decision to choose
it ahead of other claimants for investment.

It can be said that Bhoomi provides an object lesson on selecting criteria
for prioritizing investments, to all project planners intending to take
computer-assisted services to the rural hinterland. Indeed the project has
heeded the cautionary advice of a respected expert, which says that one
needs to look at all the rural requirements from the ground up,
comprehensively and be clear about the priorities to be assigned to
competing demands for investment. The challenge is to learn if, when and how
information technologies (of all kinds) can be the most cost effective means
to help people, especially poor people, to meet their basic needs and assert
their fundamental rights.

In this context a couple of other cautionary guidelines from experts can be
recalled :

o IT in the rural areas has so far not aimed at the poor and the
underprivileged but targeted primarily those echelons of the rural area that
are part of the market economy or are close to the interfaces of governance.
Correcting this tilt would be a good thing.

We have to consider what activities give the greatest benefits by being
computer aided and what should continue to be 'manual'. Not all technology
in current use is retrograde, inefficient and 'un-cool' just because it is
old or computer independent.

Eventually the data-treasure in the handsome localized system of Bhoomi will
attract notice, and some network or other will suck its substance upwards
for the use of official hierarchies well above the village and Taluk.
Administrative fiscal and planning hierarchies seeking such data are
plentiful. The Revenue Dept. itself would need it for its visionary
re-engineering of the 'business process' of land management. That would blur
the local focus and rub off the rustic shine. This would have to be
minimized as much as possible. Rather than let digital devices substitute
humans totally, one can usefully consider employing strategically placed
electronic competencies along with well-managed manual work, in a judicious
mix.

There is a good chance that numerous private agencies, like Internet Service
Providers and other suppliers of I T enabled services, wishing to take their
blessings to the rural area, may see the Revenue Department's computerized
kiosks as readymade bridgeheads across the digital divide, to add (paid for)
value to their services. What the Kiosks deliver is a 'public good', the
RTC, even if a fee is charged for it. It would seem necessary to insist that
likewise those promoting goods or services riding on the back of the Kiosk
system will satisfy some criteria of public service.

In a sense the Bhoomi project is simply computer-assisted, highly dispersed
service-delivery, on a very large scale. To deem it as equivalent to
e-governance, by stretching the meaning of governance somewhat, is the
current fashion. The RTC is no doubt valuable to the rural land user but it
is a product of activities in the Revenue Department that constitute
governance.

For example, for the Revenue Dept., the service provided by its Kiosks
cannot begin and end with just supplying an upto-the-minute RTC. Something
has to be done about the reality gap here. The RTC relies on data from a
century-old Survey and a half-century old Revenue Settlement for several of
its entries. Meanwhile the ground reality has vastly changed. In due course
of time record and reality will get into synchrony, but meanwhile is there
some way of integrating them, quickly without waiting for a brand new survey
and settlement? Again, at present the reporting of crop acreage and yield on
land is subjective and erratic. Yet it is used for planning and forecasting.
How can the reporting be made objective, reliable and timely? What methods,
IT or other, would be optimal here? These are issues of governance.

Then again the RTC leaves, far behind in time, the linked documents - such
as the phodi sketch and Tippan of the land held by the Survey Department -
as well as documentation of other agencies as to changes in status and
classification. The Revenue Department'ss sister, the Revenue Survey Dept.
has been, in some Taluks equipped with a document scanner to be able to give
you a copy of the Tippan and Sketch for the land, howsoever out-of-date. But
there is no linkage with the Kiosks. At present a paper, called the J form,
is the linkage between the Sub-Registrar who registers transactions and the
Taluk office which handles the resultant change in the RTC. Making the link
electronic and automatic when a document is registered and amending the RTC
electronically after due process, is still a long way off. A comprehensive
system would have all the linkages in position. All such expansion of the
infrastructure would need a lot of money, involve issues of funding and
prioritization, and demand diverse decisions. Such is governance.

The Bhoomi Project has to be viewed on a larger canvas if one wishes to
arrive at some ideas on how best its current capabilities can best enhance
the other activities of the Revenue Department, principally in the matter of
Land Taxation. (ENDS)