Why did Bihar halt Nitish Kumar’s ambitious land survey?

Since the last week of August, Sunny Mandal, a resident of Kalyanpur Motichak village in Bihar, has visited the land revenue office in the district headquarter of Bhagalpur three times. Kumar wants to get 1,350 square feet of agricultural land owned by his father registered on the Bihar government’s digital land record.

After the Bihar government launched a state-wide land survey on August 20, Mandal tried to register the plot of land on the official portal of the state land revenue department. The process requires uploading documents like proof of ownership called khatiyan, receipts of land taxes, a digital or physical map outlining the boundaries of the plot and a self-declaration form to show family lineage to prove claim on ancestral land.

Mandal told Scroll that his online application was rejected because his father had misplaced the khatiyan documents for the plot. “I have the khatiyan number, but there is no document to show for it,” Mandal told Scroll in mid-September. “I am trying to get a fresh copy of the khatiyan but the officials are saying that it could take three-four months because there is a huge backlog of such cases.”

Mandal’s predicament offers a snapshot of the difficulties thousands of Biharis are facing in complying with requirements of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s ambitious land survey launched last month. After weeks of complaints from many like Mandal, on Saturday, the Bihar government halted the survey for three months to give residents time to procure documents.

Initially, Kumar had set his officials a target of finishing the survey by July next year – months ahead of when elections in Bihar are expected. But, earlier this month, his deputy and Bharatiya Janata Party leader Samrat Chaudhary said there was no deadline for the process to end.

Political observers in Bihar told Scroll that Kumar wanted to get the survey completed before the elections to give a fresh lease of life to his image of “sushashan babu” – Mr Good Governance. However, negative feedback from the ground has put the government on the backfoot fearing a backlash in the elections.

Why is the land survey being conducted?

The main stated aim of the survey is to digitise records of land holdings in more than 45,000 villages in the state. A guideline on the survey issued by the government says that the exercise will involve the use of “advanced technology” such as aerial inspection and geographic information system-based mapping to prepare the digital records.

hese methods will ensure that the land records become more accurate, said Jai Singh, the secretary of the Bihar revenue and land reforms department. He added that digitised records were necessary because thousands of land-related documents were incomplete and only in paper form. “The last land survey was conducted in Bihar in the British-era and many of the documents date back to that time,” Singh said, adding that this leads to frequent land disputes, Singh said.

His concerns are backed by data. According to the National Crime Record Bureau report from 2022, the highest number of crimes related to land disputes were recorded in Bihar. In July, Chief Minister Kumar had said that the survey was an important step for restoring law and order because more than 60% of crimes occur in the state due to land-related disputes.

Pushpendra, a former professor at the Patna centre of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, told Scroll that Nitish Kumar wanted to bolster his image of providing good governance by taking up this matter.

“Resolving land disputes is a long-pending issue in Bihar and successive governments have failed to deliver on this front,” Pushpendra said. “Even if the survey is not completed before the elections, Nitish wants to be seen as the man who made the attempt.”

But as it turns out, Kumar’s plan seems to have gone awry.

Confusion and corruption play spoilsport

Sunny Mandal of Bhagalpur district told Scroll that after his application was rejected, he was approached by touts who claimed that they would get his job done if he paid them a commission. “One person asked for Rs 20,000 and another asked for Rs 25,000, and this was right outside the land revenue office” he said. “This is the case everywhere.”

Indeed, media reports from several districts emerged over the past month about middlemen asking landowners for money to complete the survey requirements on their behalf. In some cases, government officials were found to have been keeping applications pending and demanding bribes.

Pushpendra said that these instances showed that the government was not prepared enough to undertake such a massive exercise. “Nitish Kumar treated this like a vanity project,” he said. “They could have done it district wise or given a notice before starting the procedure. How can you expect everyone across 45,000 villages to have their documents in place?”

The survey suffered not just from corruption and bureaucratic sluggishness, but also confusion among residents about its intent. Santosh Paswan, a resident of Jamui, told Scroll that he feared that his plot would be confiscated since a court case over ownership was pending.

Jai Singh, the land revenue department secretary, admitted that many feared that their land would be taken away if they could not complete all the steps required for the survey. He asserted that there is no plan to confiscate land on the basis of the survey findings. But that assurance has meant little for many like Paswan.

‘A political boomerang’

In July, Kumar’s government appointed nearly 10,000 people as survey assistant settlement officers and other posts related to the exercise. At an event held in Patna to distribute the appointment letters, Kumar offered to touch feet of the additional chief secretary of the land revenue department, urging him to complete the survey by July.

“Nitish wanted to gain political mileage by settling land disputes, which is a major problem in Bihar,” said journalist Manoj Mukul, who covers Bihar for a national news channel. “But very soon the problems people were facing became a political boomerang for him.”

The first to target the Bihar government over the land survey was former political strategist Prashant Kishor, who has announced that his Jan Suraaj Party will contest on all seats in the state elections. On September 3, Kishor said that the survey would result in family disputes, and would prove to be the “last nail in the coffin” for Kumar.

Shortly after, Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Yadav also took up the matter, alleging widespread corruption in the process.

Mukul said the government received criticism even from Kumar’s alliance partner, the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose leaders complained that people were angry at being forced to produce land documents. The BJP was anxious because the land revenue ministry is held by the party’s state chief Dilip Jaiswal. Some BJP leaders publicly said that it was not proper to conduct the survey with a deadline.

Shivanand Tiwari, the national vice president of the Rashtriya Janata Dal told Scroll that the land survey had “exposed faultlines” within the ruling alliance. “Nitish ji wants the credit, but is firing from the shoulders of Dilip Jaiswal,” he said. “If that is not the case, why did Nitish not make the announcement for halting the survey?”

Even if Tiwari’s claims are not correct, observers of Bihar politics believe that the survey could well be put in cold storage till the elections. “On paper they might have stopped the survey for three months, but it is quite unlikely that they would resume it in an election year,” said Pushpendra.