Data encryption, audit trail to prevent making of fake property cards in State

By Kartik Lokhande :

Drawing a leaf out of the incident at Akola wherein Land Records Office staff had tampered with property documents, Revenue and Forest Department has now decided to initiate several measures with the help of technology to prevent making of fake property cards. These measures include data encryption, audit trail, role-based limited access, etc. The incident at Akola was discussed in State Legislature’s Winter Session also. Later, a committee headed by S Chockalingam, Settlement Commissioner and Director of Land Records, was appointed to suggest measures to prevent recurrence of such incident.

The committee went into details of the matter and on November 8, 2019, submitted its report to the State Government. In its report, committee suggested several measures to ensure better safety of property card data, prevent misuse of the data, prevent unauthorised changes in the data or detect such changes. After deliberating over the report and various measures suggested in it, Revenue and Forest Department has accepted ‘some recommendations’ in the report now. According to a communication in this regard signed by Dr Santosh Bhogle, Joint Secretary of Revenue and Forest Department, the measures approved to be taken now include role-based limited access, use of biometric access to computer system, data encryption and use of digital signature, data to be available at central server, audit trail, installation of closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras etc. As per the decision, the officials/ individuals will be granted only role-based limited access.

For instance, some employees entrusted with distribution of copy of property card will get access to computer system for that purpose only. Also, other persons will not be able to access the system. Similarly, with the use of biometric access, only the authorised staffers will get access to the system. This will also help in fixing the responsibility of staffers with biometric access. Further, data encryption will be done and digital signatures will be used while authorising any document.

If at all, there is any unauthorised change or tampering in the data that has been digitally signed, the digital signature will disappear. One more step is that the edit module will be available in computer system only till verification of original information. Later, the module will automatically be unavailable and only mutation module will have to be used to make changes. At present, the clients and data servers are available locally, which increases the risk of unauthorised changes at the local level. To plug this gap, it has been decided to keep all the data in central server, where no one except authorised person can make changes. Audit trail is one more safeguard to be put in place.

This feature will enable the higher authorities to keep track of changes made in the documents/details, time and date of changes, and who has made the changes. To ensure better level of transparency, it has been decided to make available property cards on the website of Land Records Department in tehsil-wise manner. This will enable the people to check their property cards and also report errors/unauthorised changes, if any. To restrict the transactions relating to Government/public properties, the property cards relating to such properties will be included in I-SARITA (Integrated Stamp and Registration Information Technology Application) system of Department of Registration and Stamps. In future, it is planned to register the documents on I-SARITA system by sourcing data of property cards from Electronic Product Code Information Services. There are some more measures to be taken including preservation of historical data in case of updating of the data, two-level (maker and checker) control system to ensure that no data can be deleted from system, and installation of CCTV cameras at important offices of Land Records Department.