India’s technology ecosystem has been rife with excitement about “Khata” apps. We have a bevy of new age, funded tech startups building “khata” applications – these are simple accounting, book-keeping or transaction recording systems for India’s 65 million SMEs, kirana shops etc to replace the paper chits/slips (or “khatas”) that shopkeepers tuck under their counter seats to record customer ledgers.

In the government ecosystem, the term “khata” (while having similar connotations) takes on a different but far more important use case – land records. It has been a practice to issue “paper khata certificates” as proof of land ownership in diff parts of the country by the respective state/municipal govts (since land is a state subject). As one might imagine, this is at the root of much of the forgery, corruption, trickery, malpractices (remember Khosla ka Ghosla??) that happens with land and real estate in the country. While baseline digitization of land/property records has been undertaken at many places (see this example from the Jharkhand state govt), the “paper khata” is clearly one of the weakest links in the chain.

In a path-breaking digitization project, the Bangalore Municipal Corporation (Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike BBMP) is scrapping the paper khata issuing system and instead issuing its digital versions into DigiLocker! The erstwhile paper khatas have been declared null & void, and its digitally signed electronic equivalents containing “46 kinds of information, including photo of the property, photo of the owner, property identity number (PID), apart from registration information” will be made available in the citizens’ DigiLocker accounts. The project is currently being piloted in 3 wards of Bangalore, but will be extended to all 100 wards eventually in a phased manner. Details of the project (christened e-Aasthi) are available in these newspaper reports.

From a DigiLocker standpoint as well, this is a break-through development. Here’s why – DigiLocker has enabled digitization and citizen access of over 4 billion records spanning tax (PAN), transport (DL/RC), identity (eAadhaar), education (school/college/univ certificates & degrees) et al, but land/property records have largely been a non-mover. Some states have previously issued property related leave & license agreements, sale deeds etc. but that’s few and far between. In general, enabling property/land records digitization and subsequent citizen access has been a REALLY tough nut to crack. If this Bangalore project succeeds and citizens get ready, on-demand mobile access to their (digitally signed from source!) authentic property ownership records, that’s a giant leap forward! Undoubtedly other states will follow soon and these “paper khata certificates” can be a thing of the past.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed to see how this unfolds!