Using Administrative Data for Monitoring and Improving Land Policy and Governance in India

Abstract

Demands for production and dissemination of reliable data is growing with increasing demand from public policies to monitor, compare and improve global and national developmental status and targets. Implementation of intentionally agreed commitments like Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Sustainable development Goals (SDGs) are influencing data production and availability, and the development of national statistical capacities. They also trigger challenges and opportunities in production of internationally comparable data to induce fair comparability among nations. Being a signatory to major international treaties, India has considerably improved data production, accessibility and availability over the years to ensure proper alignment of national level statistics and induce international comparison. However, very little efforts have been made to assess India's progress around data production and dissemination around growingly important land governance. This assessment attempts to identify key opportunities and challenges at the country level to improve data availability, access, timeliness and quality. India has made many progressive reforms around land laws and institutions to make land governance more inclusive and equitable; however its assessment with respect to global best practices through World Bank's Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF) indicate the need of improvements around different land dimensions. Movement towards good land governance outcomes is incumbent upon robust and regular monitoring mechanism of land indicators across spatial (viz. administrative boundaries, land being a state subject in India) and temporal scales. India has traditions of collecting, maintaining and reporting land information through nation-wide surveys, census, administrative and judicial reports/ databases. Its flagship program Digital India Land Record Modernization Program (DILRMP), has been supporting universal digitization of spatial and textual land records by the states. Together, these administrative and survey-derived datasets provide seamless opportunity for routine generation of data on key land indicators at low cost on a regular basis. Land is a state subject in India. Monitoring and reporting land-indicators at state levels would help in systematically discovering and identifying good practice that can then be documented and disseminated across states, manage change, and gradually move towards a more performance-based approach to improving land governance in India. However, there have been lack of institutionalized attempts, so far, to report land-indicators at national scale. We have tried to assess the state of data in India, particularly to track and report two critical land governance indicators viz. women land rights and forest rights, critical to ensure equity and sustainability in terms of public policy. With UN's SDG, defining similar indicators, we also attempt aligning them around SDG indicators. Status of these two parameters were analyzed using nation-wide datasets collecting whole population data, through legitimate institutions following robust processes and reporting them open access. Census (human population) data and Forest Survey of India (FSI) data were used to assess village-wise forest areas eligible for recognition of rights under India's historic Forest Rights Act, 2005. Using the FSI data and meta-analysis of census data, we calculated the estimated population (150 million including 90 million tribal) living in villages that have forest land within administrative revenue boundaries, potential area (40 million ha) that can be recognized under FRA and number of villages (0.17 million) that are eligible to initiate the claim. These data were made available across administrative boundaries of state, district and village, providing opportunities for relevant Government Ministries at Central and State level and civil society to expedite the forest rights recognition under India's largest land reform process. In order to assess women's land rights (WLR) in India in the context of the SDGs, after examining the existing data sets, we used Agricultural Census data, conducted by Government of India every fifth year following the guidelines of World Census on Agriculture (WCA). Using Agricultural census data, we have developed atlas of women land rights (based on operational holdings) in India with state and district wise granularity with further disaggregation across ethnicity (caste) and other socio-economic parameters. The study also attempted to analyze the link between the inter-regional and temporal variability of WLR and relevant policies and legal-institutional frameworks among the states to see if the correlations can better inform public policy and also induce healthy competition among states to appreciate and follow best practices. This paper presents the process, methodology and results of the data-analysis for these two land indicators while delving into the scope and challenges of dealing with existing and upcoming big datasets in India to report the land governance indicators and the potential policy spinoffs.