Session Organizer:
Video Link
Prerna Prabhakar Associate Fellow at NCAER	Deepak Sanan IAS (Retd.), Senior advisor to NCAER and IIHS and Senior Visiting Fellow at CPR
Moderator: Dr K P Krishnan IEPF Chair Professor in Regulatory Economics	Anna Locke Director of ODI’s Sustainable Environments and Societies programme
Annindya Banerjee National Legal Head -Retail Lending at HDFC Limited	Chockalingam S Director General, Yashwantrao Chavan Academy of Development Administration (YASHADA)

Indian courts are clogged with cases pertaining to land. Land-related disputes in India account for about 60 to 70 per cent of all civil litigation. About 25 percent of all cases decided by the Supreme Court involve land disputes, of which 30 per cent concern disputes relating to land acquisition (Wahi, 2019 1 ). Inaccurate land records in the country further worsens the situation. According to a pilot impact assessment of the GoI’s Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (DILRMP), a wide
divergence was observed between the on ground situation and the written land records, reflecting both a lack of comprehensiveness and accuracy in the land records (NCAER, 2017 2 ).
Digitization is an important step towards land record management as it reduces the time and cost involved in updating records and also limits the possibility of inadvertent human errors. Digitization of land record related services can also ensure e-linkages of relevant departments and hence facilitate multi stage and inter departmental processes like registration, mutation etc. However, digitization of land records alone cannot ensure an efficient system of land record management and has to be accompanied by accuracy of land records that are consistent with ground reality.
Against this backdrop, the NCAER Land Records and Services Index (N-LRSI) released in February 2020 provided an assessment of the extent of digitization and quality of land records in Indian States/UTs. N-LRSI is based on publicly available information on land records. Till date, two editions of N-LRSI have been released – N-LRSI 2020 and N-LRSI 2021 3 . Between the two editions, the overall N-LRSI score, reflecting the extent of digitisation and quality of land record increased by 16.6 per cent at the national level, reflecting state level efforts in this direction, despite the fact that during the year 2020
nearly all the economic activities in the country were hard hit by the Covid 19 pandemic. Another significant fact that became evident is that these improvements in 2021 were driven by states’ own funds, and did not use the allocations under the central program. The need for improving land administration services appears to have become a policy priority. While expanding and improving the quality of land records reflects the efforts on the supply side of these services, how are they perceived and used by the users? To address this question, it was felt that a demand side component be added to the index. This could assess to what extent households are actually aware of, use and value digitised land records. Another dimension of rights of property strengthened by improvement in the land records and related services of the government is the perception of the citizens of the security of their rights in property. Do the improvements in land records and services lead to perceptions of greater security of property rights, leading to positive impact on investments in property that enhance its value and productivity? An
the opportunity to examine these two related aspects has been presented by the integration of the ‘demand side survey’ of N-LRSI with the survey of perceptions of security of property rights in India as part of the Prindex India Survey. ‘Prindex’ is a globally comparable measure of perceived tenure security. The most

recent version is based on nationally representative surveys in 140 countries of individual respondents randomly selected from within a household, including women and young adults carried out in 2017. The Global Land Alliance (GLA) carried out the first worldwide Prindex survey in 2016 in which India was also included. The survey had 14,000 respondents in 14 Indian States to evaluate the situation in India. Later India was a test case in a three-country methodological study during 2017 to identify the best way to measure tenure security and to validate earlier results. This involved a larger sample of about 16,475 respondents in 24 Indian States and Union Territories. Learning from the global experience and more specifically experience of Prindex surveys in India, it is now proposed to carry out an integrated sample survey of households addressing both the demand side perspectives on land records and perceptions of security of land and housing property rights. The combination of LRSI and Prindex will open up opportunities for rigorous study of the inter linkages between formal tenure and subjective perception of its security. It will also allow assessing the differences in awareness about formal tenure status and related rights, allocation of assets within the household, rights to them and their productive use, participation in off-household productive activities and linkages across housing and land markets. This may be particularly relevant for rural and peri-urban markets where the separation between housing and land markets is greater than in urban markets. To meet the objectives of the proposed study, a primary survey will be conducted spanning 25 Indian States/UTs, covering 15,800 households. After a number of iterations and review by experts, sampling strategy and questionnaire in this regard have been drafted.
Besides this sample survey, covering both rural and urban households, the research program supported by separate grants to NCAER and ODI from Omidyar Network India will also include a case study of the impact of digital land records on the perception of security of rights and a study of state laws relating to transactions in land.

This proposed ILDC session aims to discuss the comparison between supply side NLRSI 2020 and 2021. The session will then delve into the broad objectives of NLRSI-Prindex India study, with specific focus on various aspects of property rights and land records that will be covered under this study and the potential implications to policies related to property rights in India.