The Digital Land Paradox: Digitisation, Title Certainty And The Persistence Of Land Disputes In India
India has digitised land records at extraordinary speed and scale: as of 2024, roughly 98.5 per cent of rural Records of Rights have been computerised under the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (“DILRMP”), and Karnataka's Bhoomi system the country's first comprehensive land-records computerisation effort, launched in 2000 remains the most-cited success story in Indian e-governance. Yet land and property disputes still account for an estimated two-thirds of all pending civil litigation in India, and the average land dispute takes roughly two decades to resolve. This paper argues that this is not a paradox of implementation but a paradox of legal architecture: Indian land records, digitised or not, remain presumptive rather than conclusive evidence of title, because the underlying statutory scheme the Registration Act, 1908, the Transfer of Property Act, 1882, and state land revenue acts such as the Karnataka Land Revenue Act, 1964 was never built on a Torrens-style register of title and has not been re-engineered by any of the successive digitisation programmes to become one. Digitisation improves the speed, transparency and tamper-resistance with which an unreliable record can be retrieved, but it does not, by itself, resolve whether that record is legally correct. Drawing on Supreme Court and Karnataka High Court authority holding that revenue and mutation entries “neither create nor extinguish title,” and on both the celebratory and critical scholarship surrounding Bhoomi including the World Bank's positive evaluation and Solomon Benjamin and co-authors' 2007 political-economy critique documenting increased bribery, transaction delay and elite land capture following computerisation the paper traces how a technically successful digitisation project can leave, and in some documented respects worsen, the underlying title-certainty problem it was designed to solve. The paper concludes with an assessment of what a genuine transition to conclusive titling, as contemplated by NITI Aayog's 2020 Draft Model Act on Conclusive Land Titling and the DILRMP's own stated objectives, would require beyond digitisation alone.
Anushka Acharya & Karthika SD