The central government has decided to take a leaf out of the state government’s drone survey to map habitations in rural areas and replicate it across the country.
The first survey of properties in the state using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) was launched in Pune district’s Sonori village last year to map spatial information.
The purpose was to give property titles to residential and other properties in around 40,000 villages and help residents gain better liquidity on these assets.
“We started the survey in Pune and then planned to replicate the same across the entire state. We were about to form teams to carry out the same, but could not due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The work will continue post-monsoon,” said settlement commissioner S Chockolingam.
He said that under the SVAMITVA scheme of the ministry of panchayati raj, the programme will be rolled out to provide integrated property validation solution for rural India. The demarcation of inhabitant land in rural areas would be done using drone surveying technology with the collaborative efforts of the ministry of panchayati raj, state panchayati raj department, state revenue department and the Survey of India (SOI).
The SOI has evolved standard operating procedures for acquiring very high-resolution aerial images and preparing very large scale maps at 1:500/1,000 scale using drones. Mapping of rural habitations in partnership with various state governments viz Maharashtra, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh etc primarily for use as revenue maps to confer ownership rights had been undertaken by SOI in the past one-two years.
Based on these maps or data, property cards have been issued to the citizens in Sonari village by the Maharashtra government and in SIRSI village by the Haryana government. The high resolution and accurate image-base maps have facilitated creation of the most durable record of property holdings in these areas with no legacy revenue records, said officials.
The pilot phase would be extended to six states (Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand) covering approximately one lakh villages. The respective state governments would finalise the list of villages at the time of signing of the MoU with Survey of India.
