The first such spatial survey of over 39,000 villages in Maharashtra using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will be launched in a month. The Rs 373 crore project, which will see property cards being issued to all residential and other properties in gaothans (residential areas in villages), is expected to be completed in three years. The exercise, which will cover around two-third of Maharashtra’s population, had been approved by the state cabinet in January. In 2018, a pilot project at Sonori village in Pune’s Purandar taluka saw a Survey of India (SOI) drone being used to map residential areas. Though surveys of gaothans are undertaken once they cross a threshold population of 2,000, just 3,931 of the over 43,000 villages in Maharashtra have been surveyed, albeit manually, to map out privately-owned and government properties, barren and open land in over 50 years since the Maharashtra Land Revenue Code, 1966, was approved. The residents of these 39,733 villages lack formal ownership records and documents except tax receipts issued by the gram panchayats. Hence, banks are unwilling to grant loans on such properties. Lack of a firm title and demarcation of properties also causes disputes “We plan to launch this project in a month in all the six revenue divisions in Maharashtra. The preparatory work has begun We expect that at least one or more village in each division is mapped,” said a senior official from the settlement commissionerate and department of land records. He added that the SOI planned to deploy 40 drones across Maharashtra for the project, with plans to cover up to three villages a day using a drone. This exercise will generate formal ownership records of 1.4 crore properties, ensure land-use planning, create liquid assets for villagers on properties worth thousands of crores, resolve disputes and help move towards clearer land titles. It will also use GIS-based technologies and prevent encroachment on government lands by demarcating their properties. The official explained that the project would be self-sustaining as it would recover the costs from property owners as fees for grant of sanads (ownership documents). He added that in Sonori, the department had spent Rs 2.88 lakh for the survey, but recovered over Rs 2.58 lakh. In villages where no surveys have been conducted, gram panchayats maintain registers of property but no spatial information exists. The project will also include the establishment of 400 continous operating reference stations (CORS) for better GPS accuracy of up to 10cm. The project will be done in phases in three years. In The Past

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