THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Revenue Department is working hard to make land records in all the districts in the State available on the Internet by the middle of this year.

Revenue Minister K.P. Rajendran told The Hindu here on Friday that the initiative would be another milestone in the much-lauded land reforms in the State. This ``second phase of land reforms'' would lead to greater transparency and speedier delivery of various services from the Revenue Department, including completion of land transaction formalities and issuing of different certificates.

All basic records like the area and location of the land being held by a person, his ``thandapper'' account number (the unique identification number given to a land owner), ``pokku varavu'' (mutation) certificate as well as the amount and period of tax being paid by him would be put on the net, so that the public could access the data whenever they wanted. The public could also get printouts of such data by paying certain fees. This would go a long way in eliminating the `benami' land deals and other related corruption, as it would be easy to find out the total land holdings of a person at a given point of time, the Minister said.

Mr. Rajendran said it was the encouraging response received by the pilot project launched in Kottayam in this regard that gave the Government confidence to hasten the steps for launching the scheme to computerise all land records in the State.

Under the scheme, all the Revenue Department offices in the State right from village offices would be computerised. The various data available in the village office, including the land records and the different certificates issued will be fed on to the computer. The computers in the village offices will be linked to those in taluk, district and State-level offices, so that the entire data could be stored in a central server. The data could then be published on the Internet.

In order to update the database on the land records, efforts would be made to ensure constant flow of information from the registration department to the revenue offices on any land transactions, through the computerised network. The Minister said after Kottayam, the project would be immediately implemented in Pathanamthitta and Kannur districts, where the computerisation programme was in the final stages of implementation. Eventually it would cover other districts as well.

The Minister conceded that there would be some constraints in implementing the project in the northern districts where the practices like maintaining ``pokku varavu'' records and ``thanadapper'' account numbers were not in vogue. ``Here we would follow the `Kannur Model'.

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