Re-survey of Assam villages to be completed by Dec 31 2023: Official

GUWAHATI: Re-survey of villages of Assam will be completed under Mission Basundhara project, a senior official of Assam government said here on Monday.

Mission Basunadhara was launched by Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on October 3 to streamline land revenue services and facilitate easy access to the public for their land-related work.

“Securing land rights of indigenous populations is the prime objective of the mission. The public, especially the poor and disadvantaged sections, must be able to get their land-related work done through Mission Basundhara,” principal secretary of revenue and disaster management department. Abinash Joshi said in a meeting at Assam Survey & Settlement Training  Centre at Dakhin Gaon here.

The mission aims to eliminate the middleman from the system and reduce unnecessary visits to government offices while empowering the public to resolve land-related issues online in a hassle-free manner, Joshi said.

A total of 9 lakh people have submitted applications for settlement of their land issues across the state under this mission. Of them 7 lakh application have been received online. More than 45, 000 cases have been settled. The rest will be settled within the next four to five months, he said.

Joshi said the maps of the land of all villages are being digitally prepared using drones for the maiden time.

This initiative has been undertaken after a long gap of 55 years. The previous survey was carried out — manually — way back in 1965.

Many revenue villages do not have such area maps while the old area maps of several other villages got damaged owing to various natural reasons over time.

There are approximately 18,700 villages in Assam. We will utilize drones to survey all these villages under ‘Mission Basundhara’, he said.

The drone has been in use in mapping of villages in Dibrugarh district and a pilot project has also been started at Chandrapur in Kamruo district,

Joshi was inaugurating a certificate course on ‘Earth Observation & Applications: Fundamentals, Recent Trends in Technological Advancement and Services’ jointly organised by North Eastern Space Applications Centre (NESAC) and Assam Survey & Settlement Training Centre (ASSTC) here.

Joshi urged the participants of the course to be open to the use of technology. He hoped that all of them would sincerely complete the course and contribute towards land survey and settlement as has been aimed through schemes like Mission Basundhara.

The programme was also attended by North Eastern Space Applications Centre (NESAC) director Dr SP Agarwala and ASSPC director & special secretary (science & technology) PNL Raju.

In his address, Dr Agarwal urged the participants to amalgamate modern and conventional methods for land survey for better results. They also spoke about the importance of technologies like Radar, GIS and Drones in modern land settlement procedures.

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