World Bank selects Bhoomi project for poverty meet

The World Bank has selected the Bhoomi project, an online land record data management in Karnataka for rural farmers, as a case study in the forthcoming upcoming poverty conference at Shanghai in China.

The four-day workshop will discuss the impact of online acquisition of land titles by rural farmers through its Bhoomi project.

As part of the conference, the Bank has organised field visits to the state by senior bank managers, policy makers, civil society groups and donor agencies from around the world .

The Bhoomi project in Karnataka has enabled the computerisation of 20 million records of land ownership across the state, covering nearly 7 million farmers.

Currently, field visits are being conducted to eleven sites in Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Turkey, Uganda and Yemen.

Speaking to media persons, Deepa Narayan, World Bank senior adviser and co ordinator of the visit said, "New partnerships have forged between the government, industry leaders and civil society. This field visit, while reviewing these broad changes, will focus on how infotech can be used as a tool for scaling up empowerment of the poor by increasing both access and transparency of information."

Narayan said that all the case studies will be presented at the Shanghai conference for sharing experience from similar initiatives to reduce poverty in all its dimensions.

"Various models like the Bhoomi project, the e-choupal project in Andhra Pradesh and women self help groups will be presented in Shanghai. The aim is to include these mechanisms to encourage participation for poverty alleviation, bring in a sense of accountability and transparency and also to help form communities. The Shanghai conference will lead to a declaration on reducing poverty and this will help in spreading the message faster,"she added.