In MP village, Adivasi farmers’ land goes missing from digital records

For Akla Chamar, owning even a small land parcel meant security.

For two decades, the 80-year-old farmer held on to government documents that identify him to be the “bhu-swami”, or land owner of 2.23 hectares in Dagadkhedi village in Madhya Pradesh’s Khargone district.

One of them is a 4x6 inch land rights and loan booklet that the state revenue department issued in 2001 under a scheme for Adivasi farmers with small landholdings. The other is a notarised land registry document in his name from the same year.

The booklet has the signature of the tehsildar of Bhagwanpura under which Dagadkhedi falls, and carries entries of cooperative bank loans taken by Akla against his land over the years.

Yet, when Akla searches for his details on the land records portal, MP Bhulekh, he draws a blank. The portal allows users to search land records by district, tehsil, village, plot number or the landholder’s name. But the plot, or khasra number, listed in Akla’s documents does not exist on the portal.

Like Akla, around 40 Barela and Bhil Adivasi farmer families in Dagadkhedi village close to the Maharashtra border, face a similar predicament. They possess land rights and loan booklets acknowledging their ownership of land they have cultivated.

But on the land records portal, neither their names nor khasra numbers appear in the village records. This is part of a larger problem with how land records have been digitised in Madhya Pradesh.

In June, Akla and more than 100 residents of Dagadkhedi staged a protest outside the Bhagwanpura tehsil office for nine days demanding corrections in the digital land records of the village. With day-time temperatures crossing 40 degrees celsius, Akla and the others slept outside the office with only a tent for shelter and khichdi as their daily meal.

In response, the administration sent a 12-member team of patwaris, or revenue officials, to conduct a survey and demarcation exercise to determine who was cultivating the land. But the farmers say they want the digital records to reflect that the land is theirs.

For now, the farmers are waiting for the survey to be completed and the government to provide clarity on their land parcels. If the land records are not updated correctly, they will launch another protest.

Digitisation problems

Madhya Pradesh first began digitising its land records in 1999-2000 under the Centre’s land records computerisation programme. The initiative was later incorporated into the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme in 2008, through which the state continued to digitise and update land records in phases. In December 2023, the Union government’s department of land records claimed 99% of all records had been digitised.

It is not clear when Dagadkhedi’s land records went online.

Farmers in the village say they became aware of the digitisation only after the disbursal of government subsidies was linked to having an entry on MP Bhulekh, the state’s land record portal, sometime around 2014.

Until then, they could buy subsidised seeds and fertilisers and take cooperative loans using their land rights and loan booklet, said Subhash Bhai, who cultivates four acres of land and supports a family of seven. He showed his family’s booklet, now yellow with age, which had entries dating back to 1995 and 2013.

After they were unable to find their khasra or plot numbers online, the farmers approached the administration seeking help. Since 2022, they have submitted a letter or representation to the administration almost every six months.

But the matter became more urgent this year when the District Trade Industry Centre, Khargone, applied to allot around 200 acres from Dagadkhedi for an industrial zone under the MP Nazul Nivartan Niyam 2020, which allows the government to assign land classified as state property for commercial use. In February, the tehsildar wrote to the gram panchayat asking for a no-objection certificate before proceeding.

The same month, the Dagadkhedi Gram Sabha voted against the project and passed a resolution demanding its cancellation. The Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas Act, 1996, gives Adivasi communities in Scheduled Areas the right to govern land and natural resources within their jurisdiction. Madhya Pradesh notified its own PESA rules in 2022, after a long delay.

While the proposed industrial zone was to come up on government land, villagers said that the move sparked concern among the community about the status of the neighbouring parcels that they cultivate which are either missing from digital records or classified incorrectly.

“The land is all we have,” said Thebri Bai, Subhash Bhai’s mother. She said she had seen generations of her family farming their land. “If there is any attempt to take our land, it is better to take our lives.”

Subhash Bhai said that the administration should explain why there was a discrepancy despite them holding government-issued land records.“We don’t want to wait any longer, we want clarity,” he said, adding that despite this being the time to prepare fields ahead of the monsoon sowing season, many villagers had left their farms to protest.

The administration, however, said the villagers do not have a claim on the land. Satyendra Bairava, Khargone sub-divisional magistrate, said the land for which the community is protesting has been “government land for the last 100 years”.

“Using the land and treating it as private property is their choice,” he said.

When asked about the ownership records that farmers possessed, he refused to respond. “You can ask the tehsil office to show you the records,” he said.

The tehsildar who was in charge during the protest, Sanjay Chouhan, has been transferred. He refused to comment on the matter. The tehsildar who is to replace him is yet to join duty. This story will be updated if either of them respond.

Nitin, an activist who has been helping Dagadkhedi residents navigate the online records, said one possible explanation for the missing records is that most of the village land was classified as forest land until the 1960s, after which it was transferred to the revenue department. It is possible that the department did not update the records systematically, he said.

The gaps in records

Historically, land records have been poorly maintained in the Adivasi areas of Madhya Pradesh, said Madhuri, a member of the Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan, a collective that has worked for more than two decades on the rights of Dalit and Adivasi communities in the state.

“Most Adivasi families do not possess complete land records today, even if they once had them,” she said.

Ramesh Sharma, national coordinator at Ekta Parishad, a social movement working on land and forest rights, said a steady weakening of the revenue administration has added to the problems.

Earlier, the basis of land records in Madhya Pradesh was a process called girdawari, he explained. Twice a year, the patwari would visit every field in his jurisdiction, record who was cultivating it and what crop was sown. A farmer’s claim to land was linked to these entries which makes the land records more reliable.

“The girdawari process was stopped in Madhya Pradesh about 20-22 years ago,” Sharma said. The official reasons were lack of funds and staff. “After it stopped, the records were not updated and became easy to manipulate or lose track of,” he added.

He pointed out that the revenue department also no longer regularly updates the atikraman panji, or the encroachment register, which logs instances where land recorded as government property is being cultivated by farmers. Under revenue rules, updating this register would normally lead to regularisation of records on cultivation or other land use of parcels.

The digitisation of land records has further complicated the matter.

Land records became easier to access but digitisation also carried forward existing errors, said Kumar Sambhav Shrivastava, founder of Land Conflict Watch, a data research organisation.

He explained that land records are maintained at the tehsil and block level. When paper records were transferred to digital systems, they were uploaded without adequate verification. As a result, mistakes or discrepancies in the original records continued into the digital database.

The activist Nitin, who is also a member of Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan, said farmers find it difficult to verify land records on the MP Bhulekh portal.

The portal does not open on mobile phones or laptops easily and accessing it requires a level of digital literacy and stable internet connection that most farmers in Dagadkhedi do not have, he said. Scroll also faced difficulty accessing the portal on several occasions despite using a high-speed internet connection.

Activist Madhuri said the responsibility for maintaining and updating land records lies with the revenue department and not with the Adivasi community.

“If there are discrepancies, the government should produce the khasra registers and other revenue records from the 1970s and 1980s and establish what is on record,” she said. “If the records are inconsistent then a fresh field survey should be conducted in consultation with the Gram Sabha.”

The cost of being left behind

For the farmers of Dagadkhedi, the missing land records are leading to financial loss.

The family of Nan Bhaiya Narla, 45, has farmed land in Dagadkhedi for three generations. He cultivates maize on nine acres, but the family has records for only four.

One kg of maize seeds costs Rs 1,600 in the open market. The same would have cost Rs 600 if Narla could claim the government’s seed subsidy, which he cannot without a valid entry in the state’s digital land records.

Similarly, the government’s minimum support price for maize is Rs 2,410 per quintal, but Narla had to sell his last maize harvest at a nearby mandi for Rs 1,500-Rs 1,600 per quintal.

Nitin, the activist, said a valid khasra entry in the state’s digital land records is a mandatory to avail the minimum support price or crop insurance or the Rs 6,000 annual cash support that the Union government provides farmers under PM-Kisan Samman Nidhi.

For the already marginalised Adivasi community, being excluded from direct cash transfer schemes and agricultural subsidies cuts deep. Most small farmers cultivate on fragmented landholdings, so even small losses add up.

In a good monsoon year, Narla’s household earns around Rs 1.5 lakh. In a bad year, losses can reach Rs 70,000-80,000. Whenever farmer families face large crop losses, members travel to neighbouring Maharashtra for daily wage work to make up the shortfall, Narla said.

“Jo hai usse jod ke hum apne bachchon ko khila rahein hain,” Narla said. “We cobble together whatever we have to feed our children.”

The way out

The Khargone district administration has suggested a way out of the mess in land records. Shivram Kanse, a resident of Dagadkhedi, said officials said that the Adivasi cultivators could seek rights under the Forest Rights Act.

This process would first require the land to be classified as forest land and then converted back to revenue land, with the farmers having to prove their claims once again. Nitin, the activist, said that under Rule 17 of the Panchayats Extension to Scheduled Areas Act, the Dagadkhedi Gram Sabha can directly recommend corrections to existing land records.

Farmers in Dagadkhedi say there are similar problems in land documentation in nearby villages. However, officials refuse to pay attention to the complaints of one or two persons if they go alone, Kanse said.

What worked in their favour was collective action. “They agreed to halt the project and order a survey only because we refused to leave the tehsil office,” said Kanse, referring to the proposed industrial project.

The farmers are now preparing for the sowing season in the fields they have cultivated for decades.