E-governance: Futurism or Feudalism?

E-governance initiatives across India are aimed at simplifying the country's incomprehensible patchwork of laws and bureaucracy into one simple program that can be sorted and searched with all the ease of Google. Yet some scholars charge that the program's slick exterior cloaks feudal impulses.

Take Bangalore's Bhoomi project for example. The project codifies hundreds of different forms of land tenure into a single database so that the central government can issue legal deeds to prospective buyers. Anyone who has ever tried to look into real estate in India knows that land claims are a big headache, and one small mistake can mean that you forfeit your entire investment because of multiple valid claims on a single plot of land. The problems usually arise when one person owned a plot of land a hundred years ago and, on death, dispersed it to his/her relatives until there is no clear title. Over the years different children quibble over who owns what piece and often times the issues are never resolved. While the land stays in the family it is no problem, but when someone wants to sell it to, say, a multi-national company, the big bucks involved can lead to tense situations. Well-intentioned people in the government compiled Bhoomi so that land claims could be verified and to encourage investment.

The way it works is that a person with a valid claim can show up at any Bhoomi kiosk, declare he owns the land (showing documents helps) and then upload his information to the system. The kiosks use biodata--fingerprints, eye scans, or some other such thing, to verify that person's identity. While that is all well and good, problems come from two ends.

There are two problems with this.

First. Since most claims are contested to begin with, there is a lot of pressure on the terminal level to make a decision on who the ultimate owner of a particular parcel is. Families fight over it and there have been several instances of local goons and the so-called "land mafia" getting involved to strong-arm their ways into a deed. Violence and land struggles are nothing new, but now when mobsters take over a Bhoomi terminal they control the legal infastructure as well.

Second. Once the deeds have been categorized, it becomes very easy for the government to use new eminent domain processes to usurp the land and dole it out investors. The people who can't resolve their disputes over valid titles are often pushed off their parcel by police waving lathis or construction company vigilantes.

Solly Benjamin, a well-known scholar in Banglaore, has been writing about the Bhoomi project for several years, and I had the chance to meet him for coffee a few months ago. He drove me around town in his ancient Padmini Fiat and showed me several plots of land that were fenced off by the government to be sold, and yet had dozens of families living on them.

He says that the Bangaloreans who predated the IT boom don't have access to the city's new found wealth. Lack of cash means they are steadily being pushed into the outskirts. But the city is expanding rapidly and a new IT corridor to the West of the city is coming up and more and more people are being pushed into slums and other cities. Rather than help poor people keep track of their land and secure their place in the government by registering on the internet, the Bhoomi project is instead accelerating their removal.

Contested land claims make it difficult to buy and sell land. That is a blessing in disguise for many of the city's poor. Sure they can't make money off the real-estate, but at least they can keep a roof over their heads. The Bhoomi project isn't so much a boon, as a way to reinforce a new feudalism.