NEW DELHI: The ministry of road transport and highways will begin a comprehensive exercise to identify unutilised land parcels within and outside the right of way (RoW) along the national highways, officials said.RoW is a set of property rights given to government agencies facilitating them to construct and maintain the road projects. The pan-India mapping will help the agencies in compilation of a consolidated record of land for the government use.”For this land data asset management programme, the ministry will form a dedicated unit and engage a team of land and GIS experts to support each regional office in different states to collate plot-wise information,” said a ministry official associated with the programme. Scrutiny of available government documents and on-ground visits to towns or villages are proposed as part of the exercise, the official said.The ministry already has a land acquisition portal — Bhoomi Rashi — as a single-point platform to process land notifications and streamline the land acquisition process and information on land records within and outside of RoW, according to officials. The details of land collected though the mapping process will eventually help in identification of unutilised land parcels through the portal, the officials added.The unit to be set up for the purpose will review and suggest recommendations to improve the online platform for collating digitised land records and create a centralised repository of land. “This will also pave the way for upgrade of the portal subsequently,” an official said, adding that at present the total length of NHs, including expressways, is approximately 1.40 lakh kilometres.Soon the ministry will start conducting workshops for officials in coordination with its land acquisition division to explain methodology and processes of digitising revenue maps, data collection and collation. For an effective process, it has also planned to monitor the progress on a weekly basis.
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