Renovating Cadastral Map- An Indian Perspective

The poor implementation of land administration in India has resulted in lot of court cases (Ravi 2006), poor access to credit and delays in major infrastructure projects. (McKinsey 2001) suggests that if efficient land administration system in India can take care of the distortion in the land market, Indian GDP growth rates may go up by 1.3%. The Survey of India is embarking on a large-scale topographical mapping of the whole country and this provides a substantial opportunity to renovate the existing cadastral maps as done elsewhere in the world. The basic question is; how can it be done in India? In this paper, I have identified the various issues involved in it. The literature survey reveals that the quality model based on relative precision, as practiced in Dutch cadastre is more meaningful to the users, and I have proposed the same for India. A simple methodology for tackling the difference in legal area and calculated area have been proposed, which gives the opportunity to fix this allowable difference by balancing the quality and required amount of fieldwork. It was realised that based on the prevailing situation and requirement two different approaches are available for the actual renovation of cadastral map. Having this in mind, a comprehensive framework comprising of both methods for the India