Land is one of the most important financial assets for Indians, and yet also one of the most disputed. Many of us have experienced the frustration over not being able to access reliable and accurate ownership records or maps of the land we own or wish to buy.
Digitisation has been increasingly seen as the solution to improving land records and services in India, as it eliminates redundant labour and human error while simplifying the task of updating records, and also makes it more accessible for the people. The Government of India has been working towards this since the late 1980s, however, the progress on digitisation is yet to meet the mark.
In order to measure this progress and identify the areas where states were performing poorly on digitisation, the National Centre for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), under the Property Rights Research Consortium, formulated a framework called the NCAER-Land Records and Services Index (N-LRSI) in 2019 to gauge the extent of these schemes and rank states and analyse their progress. NCAER has so far published two editions of this Index.