How far can schemes such as SVAMITVA and land pooling resolve land-title gaps in peri-urban India?

Since Independence, government surveys covered only agricultural land. This left the inhabited parts of villages without a record of rights: lal dora in Punjab–Haryana and gaothan in Maharashtra [1]. As cities absorb these villages, SVAMITVA and land pooling can largely close the paperwork gap, but only partly close the development gap.

What they can resolve

• Record of rights: SVAMITVA maps abadi land by drone at 1:500 scale and issues property cards. Nearly 36 lakh cards had been issued across about 29,000 villages by June 2022 [1].
• Credit and disputes: cards let owners use their homes as collateral for bank loans and reduce property disputes [1].
• Fiscal base: accurate GIS maps help panchayats assess property tax and plan better [1].
• Title retained in pooling: Delhi's modified Land Pooling Policy (2018) covers urbanisable areas of 95 villages. Owners pool their land and get developed land back [2].
• Non-coercive model: the DDA acts only as a facilitator, which avoids compulsory acquisition [3].

Where they fall short

• Rural-only design: SVAMITVA targets rural abadi [1]. Villages notified as urban fall into a policy grey zone.
• A card is not a service: a title does not lay sewers or roads. Those depend on pooling and master plans.
• Collective-action trap: a sector qualifies only when 70% contiguous land is pooled [2]. Holdouts stall whole sectors, which led to proposals to make pooling of the rest mandatory [4].
• Slow uptake: the policy has been reworked repeatedly since 2013 [2]. Applications (6,973 by July 2022) have not yet turned into developed sectors [5].
• Legacy irregularity: a card alone cannot regularise dense construction that never got building approval.

Way forward

• Extend drone mapping to urban-notified villages through state revenue laws.
• Sequence the reform: titles first, then services, then phased taxes and building bye-laws.
• Link property cards and pooling records in one parcel database.

SVAMITVA answers "who owns this?" and land pooling answers "how will it develop?". Together they resolve much of the gap, but not all of it. Unified rural–urban land records and participatory planning, in line with SDG 11, can turn peri-urban villages from planning anomalies into secure, serviced neighbourhoods.