MP bureaucracy rises to challenge, decides 7 cases every minute

Steel frame is rusted, but can still deliver

NK SINGH

Christmas is time to celebrate. And MP Government has reasons to cheer. Its bureaucracy is in good spirits. Chief Secretary Basant Pratap Singh was a happy man as he went on LTC last week – his first in ten years – after pulling off one of the most stupendous tasks ever undertaken in the annals of State administration. Burning midnight oil, the Government has succeeded in disposing of a record two million revenue cases in just six months.

Yes, you heard it right. More than 20 lakh cases over a period of six months, deciding, on an average, 7 cases every minute! The good old steel frame may be rusted, but it is still capable of delivery. “It was part of our special drive to clear pending revenue cases,” says Arun Kumar Pandey, Principal Secretary of revenue department.

The drive was undertaken in July after Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had threatened to “hang upside down” District Collectors if they failed to clear pending revenue cases within a month. Chouhan, usually polite and courteous, was enraged when he discovered that lakhs of cases of land disputes, ownership rights, demarcation and diversion had piled up in 1,439 revenue courts of MP.

The Chief Minister learnt about pendency of revenue cases when he started interacting with farmers in the aftermath of their agitation for remunerative prices last summer. The agitation that led to police firing signalled the first ever decline in Shivraj’s popularity. Himself an agriculturist, Chouhan knows the importance of revenue cases and records in a farmer’s life. Problem of pendency was compounded by glitches in land record software. E-Khasra had become a nightmare, with reports of farmers’ lands being recorded in the name of other landowners. Chouhan realised that he was sitting on a political landmine. That is when he read the riot act to bureaucracy.

A revenue officer to the core – as all IAS officers are trained to be – the Chief Secretary took it as a challenge. BP Singh is widely recognised as a no-nonsense, honest officer. As he set upon the task, it opened a Pandora’s Box. No one even in revenue department had any idea about real magnitude of the problem. As a top level team of officers headed by Singh started travelling to divisional headquarters, interacting with field officers in meetings that often continued past midnight, it was horrified to find cases pending since 1957. The Government also found that officers were not registering cases – over six lakh cases were registered in three months – and even if they did, they were not updating records in the online system. It was a case of utter negligence.

The figures that finally emerged baffled even hardcore cynics. In the last revenue year (October 1016 to September 2017) officials decided 911,499 cases of land disputes and disposed of 9 lakh pending applications for change in ownership records, division, diversion and demarcation. According to official estimates, almost 80 per cent of these 18 lakh odd cases were disposed of in the last three months, an average of 16,000 cases per day! One can imagine the effort that went into the drive.

However, 3.20 lakh disputed cases remained pending by the end of September. In the first three months of this revenue year, commencing in October, three lakh new cases were registered. The administration has disposing of another 2.62 lakh cases during this period. “We turned that disaster into an opportunity,” says Hariranjan Rao, whom the CS specially roped in as Revenue Secretary for troubleshooting and streamlining the system.

What caused this huge backlog? There were two main reasons behind it. One is the huge vacancy in revenue department. Sixty 60 per cent posts of Tehsildars are vacant. There are 11,000 Patwaris, the backbone of system, against the sanctioned strength of 19,000. Another reason for pendency is that revenue machinery was doing everything else except its basic work. Shivraj Singh Chouhan has a penchant for spectacular programmes. The machinery was busy focussing on CM’s pet projects like Narmada yatra, tree plantation, onion purchase and procuring buses and crowds for CM’s periodical political gatherings. The Collectors focussed so much on earning brawny points with the powers that be that they neglected everything else.

A posting in revenue department, once the heart of administrative services, is now considered being shunted to a loop line. Comments Atindra Sen of 1978 batch: “Can anyone recall names of last five Commissioners of Land Records and Settlement in the State? Does the post even exist anymore? When we joined service it was the terror named Sathyam. We took our land records training pretty seriously then.” Sen was referring to S. Sathyam (1961 batch), considered a strict disciplinarian.  

One hopes that our bureaucrats have learnt their lesson from this disaster, the lesson that each IAS trainee is expected to learn at the feet of Tehsildars, Naib Tehsildars and Patwaris. The CS must not rest on his laurels. He must look at the empty half of the glass. About 3.58 lakh revenue cases are pending even now!

Powers That Be, my column in DB Post of 25 Dec 2017

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