Bhoomi RashiEveryone will BenefitThe Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Govt. of India has designed Bhoomi Rashi as a single point platform for online processing of land acquisition notifications to accelerate highway infrastructure development projects in India.

Bhoomi Rashi will fast track the process of land acquisition and result in greater benefits for all stakeholders. Farmers, landowners, contractors and investors will benefit from the transparency introduced by the portal in the land acquisition process.

The Bhoomi Rashi portal will be a new milestone in the nation’s journey towards DIGITISATION and TRANSPARENCY.

The Need for Land AcquisitionMinistry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) is engaged in developing India’s road infrastructure sector and executes its projects through various implementation agencies, viz. National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), National Highways & Infrastructure Development Company Ltd. (NHIDCL) and State PWDs. The objective of the Ministry is to fast-track economic growth, for which improved road connectivity, specifically expansion and upgradation of the National Highways network, is of vital importance.

The vision of Shri. Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister, Road Transport & Highways, is to bring about large scale transformation of system and structure by re-engineering current processes and procedures. To achieve this, MoRTH has undertaken a complete review of the key issues related to incumbent organization structures, processes and systems, including, inter-alia, streamlining key process steps like land acquisition.

Land Acquisition is critical for the commencement and completion of construction of National Highways, which begins once the alignment plan and land acquisition plan for a specific project, are approved. The process starts with the appointment of a revenue functionary of the State Government as Competent Authority for Land Acquisition (CALA) for each NH Project. It ends at taking of physical possession of the land by the implementing authority and disbursal of compensation to each affected/interested party.

Earlier Challenges in Land AcquisitionThe critical aspect of a National Highway construction/upgradation project is the timely availability of land. In many cases, it had become a major bottleneck on account of slow procedures and delay in issuance of notifications.

The entire land acquisition process was time consuming and lacked transparency earlier, leading to unforeseen delays. It involved drafting and publication of multiple notifications, each of which would pass through several authorities for processing/approval before its final publication. The processing of these notifications manually was time-consuming and prone to errors.

Further, the funds out of which compensation was to be paid for land acquired under the National Highways Act 1956, were placed solely at the disposal of the Competent Authority for Land Acquisition (CALA). For NHAI projects and National Highways Interconnectivity Improvement Projects (NHIIP), these funds were placed in a joint account held in the name of CALA and Project Director (PD). Funds were disbursed by CALA after declaration and finalization of land acquisition awards.

Since Land Acquisition involves huge amounts of Compensation and the whole process takes place over a prolonged period, these funds were unnecessarily parked in CALA’s account for a long time, thereby, resulting in delays in projects.

Bottlenecks in manual procedure of Land Acquisition

• Parking of huge Government funds with CALAs

• Mismatch or Errors in entries like Survey Numbers, Village Name, name of CALA etc.

• Physical movement/processing of draft Notifications for their publication in the Gazette of India-Extra Ordinary, resulting in delay

• Multiple Entries of Land Parties by CALA at every subsequent stage

• Non transparency in determination and disbursal of compensation

Bhoomi RashiThe SolutionThe need of the hour was workflow based automation of the present Land Acquisition process for NH projects . Development and operationalization of a comprehensive web-based portal was the answer.

This portal would enhance the efficiency of the land acquisition process, ensure transparency and accountability, and result in e-transfer of benefits directly to the accounts of the beneficiaries. Its benefits would be faster process completion, transparent fund transfer to the land owners/beneficiaries and reduction of procedural errors.

The Making of Bhoomi RashiMoRTH decided to develop an online Land Acquisition (LA) system which would provide linkage across authorities, eliminate the need of physical copy, reduce the formatting errors/clerical mistakes and enable easy tracking of the draft notification.

The Land Acquisition process involves several stakeholders, including State PWDs who prepare the DPRs on the basis of which the land is acquired, state revenue officials who carry out the actual land acquisition, Project zones of the Ministry which obtain approval of the Minister (Competent authority) and Land Acquisition notifications.

Extensive stakeholder consultations were held over a period of 12 months, culminating in the final design of the utility, titled ‘Bhoomi Rashi’.

Training/orientation sessions were organized over a period of 6 months in each state with officers who would actually be using the portal for submitting draft notifications, and their suggestions were also incorporated in the user interface and experience design of the portal.

With regard to 711 districts and 6,55,297 villages data has been incorporated and will be updated from time to time by the admin:

• States: All states of India (E Gov Standards Master Data)

• Districts: Under each state, details of districts of India (E Gov Standards Master Data)

• Sub Districts/Tehsil/Taluka: Under each district, details of sub districts (E Gov Standards Master Data)

• Villages: Under each Sub District, details of villages (E Gov Standards Master Data)

• All Regional offices of MoRTH, NHAI & NHIDCL with login credentials for RO user with DDO Code

• Login credentials for State PWDs officers

The system is completely secure with OTP based security being provided at each level.

SECURITY

MASTERDATA

Features at a glanceThe broad features of the system are as follows:

• Bilingual application with Hindi and English for easy usability

• Preparation of interface for adding project basic details including LA sanction details.

• Preparation of interface for Land Acquisition locations i.e. villages

• Preparation of Interface for CALA details

• Interface for generating LA notification

• Interface for Land Details

• Interface for generation of 3a, 3A & 3D notification: organizational email IDS for all those involved in the process flow to ensure smooth e-office management

• Interface for Objections and processing

• Interface for compensation determination and finalization

• Generation of web service for getting payment status and beneficiary validation from PFMS

• Interface for Land owners and affected parties

• Interface for reports generation

PROJECTSCOPE

The portal has been designed to transmit regular and real time notifications on:

• Generation of login credentials

• Submission of proposals

• Finalization of compensation by CALA, RO, MoRTH/ NHAI/NHIDCL

• Payment

• Data Entry in English - System would convert it in Hindi and show in a parallel text box

• For all master data, both Hindi & English would be added

• During selection, English (Hindi) would be shown

• On selection, selected value would be shown in parallel LABEL field

• In reports, first data would be shown in English and after page break, report in Hindi would be shown

LANGUAGE

ALERTS

Bhoomi RashiCreating New OpportunitiesBhoomi Rashi was made operational on 1st April 2018. Up till August 2018, 850 LA proposals have been processed through the portal.

The portal has the potential to open new opportunities, and enhance efficiency in the LA process. Earlier, physical processing of the cases usually took weeks to even months. Now, the portal has reduced the processing time to a few days, around 2 weeks for majority of the cases.

Bhoomi Rashi is now integrated with the Public Financial Management System (PFMS) platform of the Ministry of Finance, for deposition of compensation in the account of affected/interested person, on real-time basis. The first set of actual payments in this regard have been successfully made through PFMS for a NH Project in the State of Rajasthan.