Technology at par! Drones to survey land and properties in Karnataka

NewsBharati    16-Jul-2018
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Bengaluru, July 16: Bringing efficiency in surveying properties in Karnataka, the state government has launched the pilot project enabling drone to survey the land in the state starting Sunday. Over the next three days, this drone will fly across the locality, capturing images of buildings, to map their boundaries.

In coordination with the Survey of India, the Survey Settlement and Land Records (SSLR) Department, has taken up the pilot initiative to map properties, with an aim to generate an accurate record of all the properties in the city, paving the way for the creation of Urban Property Ownership Record (UPOR). As part of the initiative taken up over 1.8 square kilometers, nearly 4,000 properties in Jayanagar 4th Block will be mapped.

The images generated by the drone’s camera will be processed and analyzed to map the boundaries of each property. In a city like Bengaluru, where property-related litigation is rampant, this initiative would help identify encroachments. If successful, this would be replicated across the city.

The Survey of India had earlier helped conduct a similar survey in a much smaller area near Pune in Maharashtra; this is the first time that such an initiative is being taken in a fully urban area. The project aims to determine the drones' efficacy in accurately surveying properties and build a functional model that can be expanded to the whole of Karnataka. The government plans to survey a total of 2.5 crore agricultural plots and 50 lakh urban properties across the state.

Enabling the use of technology, the government has decided to permit drones for this survey. The Karnataka Land Revenue Act, 1964, mandates that a land survey be carried out every 30 years but the manual procedure takes decades to complete it.

The manual survey is also prone to human bias and errors. Considering these factors, the government has decided to take up drone-based surveys that are seen as being objective, accurate and providing an up-to-date map of each property at 1/10th of the time of the manual survey.