The Greater Chennai Corporation will complete work on digitisation, mapping and computerisation of 10,000 corporation land parcels by December.
Civic officials have planned to conduct meetings with residents’ associations in all zones to identify OSR (open space reservation) land that had not been properly handed over to the Corporation. The records pertaining to layouts of residential areas in all 200 wards of the city are likely to be collected and matched with records of the Corporation to trace land records that had not been handed over to local authorities.
Many promoters had not handed over OSR land to the local body, officials said. This was caused due to the delay in clearance by the Town Planning Committee a few years ago. The erstwhile local bodies had failed to hand over records pertaining to Corporation land to zones or the Land and Estates Department of the Greater Chennai Corporation after 2011, officials said. The merger of areas such as Velachery had led to the loss of many records, officials said. Many land records were yet to be traced in the newly added areas because of issues relating to handing over of records by the erstwhile local bodies before the merger.
The Corporation had been developing parks in OSR land. The civic body had 774 parks, 283 schools, 140 primary health centres and over 3,000 office buildings in its lands. Burial grounds, community halls, Amma canteens and homeless shelters had been developed on such lands. Some land records had been damaged. Retrieving of information pertaining to lands remained a challenge in some areas, officials said.
After computerisation of the records, residents in 200 wards will have access to the information.
The information would be shared online to improve transparency.
“We will identify most encroachments on Corporation land after the completion of the project,” said an official.