Two-thirds of India’s population lives in rural areas, where few have adequate land registration and property disputes are common.
“This is a historic effort toward rural transformation,” PM Modi said in a speech broadcast on the Internet when launching the physical distribution of property cards under the scheme ‘SVAMITVA’ (property).
The government plans to use drone technology to map parcels of land in rural areas and cover some 620,000 villages over the next four years, he said.
“Despite owning houses, people faced multiple problems borrowing from banks. These people can now very easily borrow from banks after showing property cards issued under the property scheme,” the prime minister said.
An initial group of 100,000 people from more than 750 villages in six states will begin receiving the digitized property cards this month.
Each card will have a unique identity number similar to the Aadhaar card, the world’s largest biometric identity project, which covers more than 1 billion people in India.
On the occasion, Modi also interacted with various beneficiaries of the Village Survey and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas (SVAMITVA) scheme and said that it is a big step for the country to become ‘aatmanirbhar’ (self-sufficient).
“Experts from around the world have emphasized that property rights play an important role in the development of a country,” he said to highlight the importance of the measure.
Young people living in the villages can now use bank loans against their properties to start on their own, he said, stating that a developing country like India needs to have clear land ownership rights.
Property rights will give young people a confidence in themselves that can lead to self-reliance, he said.
The beneficiaries are from 763 villages in six states, including 346 from Uttar Pradesh, 221 from Haryana, 100 from Maharashtra, 44 from Madhya Pradesh, 50 from Uttarakhand and two from Karnataka.
The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has said that the launch will allow owners of a lakh to download their property cards via an SMS link sent to their mobile phones, and this would be followed by distribution physical property cards by the respective state governments.
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