Question : Bhoomi Rashi Portal

(a) whether the Ministry has recently launched the Bhoomi Rashi portal, if so, the details thereof along with the reasons therefor;

(b) whether the Government is of the view that full digitalisation and paperless processing of land acquisition cases would promote transparency, quicken the process, remove corruption and deficiencies and if so, the details regarding the manner in which the portal would prove to be in the interest of the people; and

(c) whether the Bhoomi Rashi portal is an example of resounding success of the Ministry, allowing land acquisition process to be digital and paperless, resulting in transparency in land acquisition cases, quickening the process, doing away the corruption and removing shortcomings?

THE MINISTER OF STATE IN THE
MINISTRY OF ROAD TRANSPORT AND HIGHWAYS

(SHRI MANSUKH L. MANDAVIYA)

(a) to (c) Yes, Madam. In the past years, acquisition of land for the purpose of National Highway projects, payment of compensation to the land owners etc were done manually by physical movement of documents in the form of files. However, in that procedure some constraints viz. delay in issuing notification, errors in the land/area details etc were being faced. In order to overcome these issues, to cut short delays and avoid parking of public funds with the Competent Authority for Land Acquisition (CALA), Ministry has developed a web based Utility –BhoomiRashi to fully digitize and automate the entire process of land acquisition.

Comprehensive details including names of 711 districts and 6,55,297 villages have been built into the system based on the population Census-2011, duly updated on the basis of revenue records of all the State Governments. The system helps in expediting the process by providing simultaneous Hindi translation and has been linked to the e-gazette for expeditious publication.

With the operation of this Portal, the land acquisition process has been expedited significantly, become error-free and more transparent and the notifications at every stage are being processed on real time basis. While the physical processing of the cases usually took considerable time, ranging from weeks to even months, and there were errors whose rectification caused further delays, the processing time using this portal has been reduced to less than two weeks in a majority of cases and even a few days in some cases.

The Utility has been made more user friendly by adding the feature of SMS services to the beneficiaries so as to enhance timeliness in dissemination of information, along with transparency, and also achieve the objective of real time tracking of activities and generation of reports, relating to land acquisition. It is, therefore, an example of resounding success of the Ministry.

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