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The Madhya Pradesh government will employ the state’s youth instead of patwaris to survey and record farm areas and crops sown. This scheme has been implemented on a pilot basis in Neemuch and Seoni districts on the instructions of the central government.
Under this, a survey of sowing areas and crop types in the fields will be done by local youth instead of patwaris, the traditional authorities who maintain ownership records for a given area. Photographs from a survey will be uploaded on Smart Application for Revenue Administration (SARA) and verified by patwaris later. Such surveys will be done thrice a year and information collected will be used in procurement, crop insurance, maintaining record of sowing area/ actual produce, and other farmer-related schemes.
‘‘As per the plan of the central government, Seoni and Neemuch districts have been included in the pilot project for girdavari. In this, a competent person of the village will be the surveyor, due to which employment will be available at the local level. As all the information being uploaded online on the app, there will be no possibility of any kind of forgery,’’ said Sanjay Goyal, commissioner at the Land Records Department, referring to collection of information on crop sown.
Rameshwar Gurjar, a farmer in Harda district, said that patwaris often record information about girdavari without surveys, resulting in losses for farmers. He hoped that the problem would end once the process became online.
If this pilot project is successful, it will be implemented in about 53,000 villages in all 52 districts of the state. Records of about 8 million farmers' fields will become available online as a result.
