Committee's fate hangs in balance

A Supreme Court-appointed panel used technology smartly to sort out Shivaram Karanth Layout’s land acquisition tangles. Will it be allowed to complete the work?

After working for three years on setting right the Bangalore Development Authority’s (BDA) Dr Shivarama Karantha Layout mess, the Justice A V Chandrashekhar Committee’s tenure is ending by the end of this month. The Supreme Court (SC) is expected to decide its fate in its next hearing. 

Citizens fear that if the SC does not extend the duration, the work done so far might be wasted, as they do not trust BDA enough.

Vasanth Veerasagara, a resident of the area, says that the committee has helped the genuine landowners. He says many are confused as the committee’s term is ending, and people want the committee to continue to oversee the completion of awarding compensation for farmers.

Many residents and farmers who lost land plan to submit a letter to the SC asking it to extend the committee’s tenure, as they feel the committee has been fair and pro-farmer in its approach.

The committee members say more than 87% of the critical work is over. Some of the works, such as roads, drains and sewage connections, are underway, while electrical connections, sewage treatment plant construction etc. are pending.

SC’s solution to tackle the mess

Dr Shivarama Karantha Layout was notified in 2008, along with the Kempegowda layout. When landowners went to court, the High Court (HC) struck down the notification. The BDA went to the Supreme Court seeking to quash the HC order. In August 2018, the SC quashed this order.

By then, buildings had come up in the layout. “The 3500 acres of land notified for the project is brownfield, not greenfield. The first issue is that buildings are already built by people who hoped the layout plan would not materialise. The second issue is the private layouts formed by various people after the project was notified. Brokers misled the buyers and sold these sites,” says S T Ramesh, a member of the Chandrashekhar Committee. 

The fact that the BDA and sub-registrars who register the lands have no formal communication over notified lands made registering of such lands easier.

The BDA again went to SC seeking suggestions on how to tackle this. The SC appointed a three-member Committee headed by Justice A V Chandrashekar, a former High Court judge. The Committee had three tasks: To check the legality of the buildings and regularise them, monitor the compensation award and the layout formation.

The other members chosen were Jayakar Jerome, former BDA commissioner and S T Ramesh, former director general of police, Karnataka. Jerome, who worked as the BDA commissioner for five years between 1999 and 2004, is an expert in land-related issues, with experience working on three BDA layouts: Anjanapura, Banashankari 3rd stage and Visweswaraya layouts, involving about 60,000 sites. Ramesh is credited with computerising the state’s police department when he headed it.

The committee met for the first time on December 8, 2020. In all, 32 people were roped in, all being retired officials who have worked in various departments, the youngest being 63.

Smart data management

The computerisation and digitalisation of the entire system are at the heart of this process. The Chandrashekhar committee sat with the technology partners, discussed every detail and designed a multi-stakeholder decision support system. 

One more committee formed by SC headed by Justice V G Bopaiah is tasked with identifying eligible landowners who surrendered their revenue land for the layout. Both the SC-monitored committees share the same database, which will help the BDA in future as everything is integrated with no scope for confusion.

As a first step, the committee set up help desks in the affected villages. Villagers did not have to visit the BDA office. People who built on the notified land were asked to submit documents related to the land and the construction. “This data went directly online to our cloud-based system, speeding up the process,” explains Jerome.

Even photos and videos taken during inspections, video interviews of beneficiaries and affected people and other multimedia data are attached to every application wherever relevant.

“The data here is immutable. No one can change anything here without leaving a digital footprint,” says Madhu Kongovi, chief executive officer of Navigem Data Pvt Ltd, tasked with the digitalisation process and data management by the Justice A V Chandrashekhar Committee. 

All related officials are given separate login details, which they can use to verify details, make notes and observations, and change things if required. The changes are easily traceable, unlike physical files.

In land-related scams, generally, the area, owners’ names, survey numbers etc, are changed by vested interests. Such issues are unlikely to come up in this system.  “The data cannot be messed with. Even if I am making the changes, I must follow a process and leave my footprints. And I will be held accountable,” says Ramesh.

Once the SC approves the file, the data is directly sent to the printer and the Regularisation Certificate (RC) is printed. It is then handed over to the beneficiary. So far, the committee has given RCs for 4251 applicants out of 7724 who wanted building regularisation.

Jerome explains the hassles in a physical file-based system. A physical file would take a lot of time and repeated reminders to pass from one stage to another. “Each application has 54 data points and 17 attachments. Everything needs to be crosschecked and scrutinised. The process would have stretched long, and we would not have regularised even one building,” he says.

The space required to keep the files, the time and manpower required to process them, the physical safety of the files—everything would have been a hassle, say the committee members. The digitalisation also helps the committee generate various reports to track the progress.

Online monitoring

The second task of the committee was to monitor the land acquisition. “3550 acres of land has been acquired. Passing the notification and awards and giving the compensation—everything will be monitored online. We don’t have to do it physically,” says Jerome.

The third mandate of the committee is to form the layout. Even this process is monitored online, with all the involved contractors and the project management consultancy feeding the data to the system and generating daily, weekly and annual reports with photographs as required. 

The progress of excavation, roads, concretisation, building of drains, sewage, water and electrical lines and everything else that is a part of the layout formation can be monitored online for every part of the nine sectors.

“Next day, when I go for inspection, I know where to go and what to ask. If we had done this 20 years ago, we did not have all these facilities. But for technology, we would not have been able to be where we are today,” says Jerome.

The system is working on a cloud-based system. The data collected is about one terabyte, and the system backups are securely maintained. All the data and the system will be transferred to BDA when the committee’s term ends. BDA officials will be trained in handling the system, says Ramesh.

Until now, the committee has generated 32 reports detailing the status of buildings built before 2014, between 2014 and 2018 and later. Thirty of these reports have been submitted to the SC and scrutinised. The court has directed the BDA to act according to the report’s suggestions.

Challenges ahead

The owners of revenue sites must apply to the V G Bopaiah Committee, which scrutinises it and decides the legality of the land title. If the title is legal, the revenue site owners can get a 30X40 site in Arkavathy layout. Irrespective of the land such owners own, they will get only one site based on their eligibility.

Many 30’X40’ sites from revenue layouts have been converted to 20’X30’ sites today, and land losers are confused about whether they will be given 30’X40’ sites, says Prakash Gowda, a resident who lost a revenue site he purchased before 2017 to the project.

Meanwhile, the BDA still has more work to do on the allotment front and to mop up the money needed. Because of the brownfield nature of the project, the area available for fresh development has also decreased, says Jayaram N, BDA commissioner. 

The work on two other housing projects, Kempegowda Layout and Arkavathi Layout, mired under legal battles over land, is progressing at a snail’s pace.