The Field Measurement Book records pertaining to entire landmass of 19,130 square km of Anantapur district is close to getting digitised by this month-end. This process pertains to land records that do not include the Forest Land.
Once the 4,39,095 records available with Anantapur officials are digitised by the Andhra Pradesh Space Application Centre, records will be available online for all the sub-parts and survey numbers, which will, in turn, help in direct mutations for the new land registrations without having to wait for months together.
Anantapur Deputy Director Survey and Land Records Bandaru Machindranath told The Hindu that while the process was started in January 2016, it was stalled for six months as many of the records were very old or mutilated coupled with manpower shortage. The records pertaining to 964 revenue villages were being integrated into it, but only 4.39 lakh records of the 4.51,751 records were available.
Very soon the DGPS — Differential Global Positioning System — would be operational and access to coordinates of a particular survey number would become very easy, said Mr. Machindranath. Work on 99.3% records was completed, he said.
The Resurvey Record or the Resettlement Record was completed in 2015 and later the FMB records digitisation process was taken up. The Survey and Land records Department faced severe crisis of manpower as majority of the Surveyors and Deputy Surveyors kept on leaving the job as many of them were either B. Tech or M. Tech graduates in a job that was meant for ITI Civil Draughtsman.
For a long time, Anantapur district that needed 63 surveyors in as many mandals had only 29 and recently all the posts were filled, but their continuation in the job was a question mark as many highly qualified persons leave the job for better prospects.