Karnataka govt to interlink family trees to curb fraud

Bengaluru: Karnataka plans to interlink family trees, or vamsha vruksha, in a bid to curb fraud and litigation, effectively building a genealogy database of households across the state. 

A family tree is used to settle disputes in inheritance and establish legal heirs for transfer of properties. Citizens draw up their family tree and apply for a certificate (attestation) with the revenue department.  

“I’ve been toying with this idea for the last one-and-a-half years, that there should be a household genealogy,” Revenue Minister Krishna Byre Gowda told DH. 

“Currently, our family trees are not interlinked. Let’s say a father got a family tree done. Next, his son will get a family tree done. The two aren’t linked,” Gowda explained. 

Gowda said connecting family trees should have been done decades back. “If this was done 30 years ago, we could have prevented so many court cases and mitigated corruption,” he said. 

Family trees are based on self-declaration and affidavits, the minister said. “Our officials go by the affidavits. There’s no way to know if a person faked a family tree and got a property transferred to someone.” 

Gowda has been talking to e-Governance officials about this. “I’ve asked officials to build an architecture. Family trees will be linked or connected prospectively,” he said. 

The project is dovetailed with the government’s plan to build an economic profile of every household, which will be linked to the Kutumba database.

More than one crore households on Kutumba have been given unique IDs. Kutumba is a comprehensive database that the government wants to use for automatic disbursal of benefits to eligible citizens without them having to even apply. 

In 2021, for the purpose of registration on Kutumba, the government issued an order allowing citizens to define ‘family’ on their own terms without conforming to traditional, official meanings.