Demystifying the Revenue Record

Sir,
This has reference to the news item’Finally,Govt issues order for maintaining revenue records in demystified manner'(DE, Nov09,2019).It is heartening to read that the Government has issued detailed guidelines to all the officers and field functioneries in the Revenue Department to ensure transparency in the functioning of the revenue admininistration with strict directions about maintenance of revenue records/extracts in a demystified and simplified manner and use of English language as subscript in the titles. Moreover,the Revenue Registers such as Mutation Register, Jamabandi Registers, Khasra Girdawri Registers etc will have proper numbering and bar coding to standardize the revenue extracts and to curb frauds in their issuance.There is no doubt that revenue record in our UT contains cryptic, ununderstandable and archaic terms written in Urdu with Persian terminology,which even a well qualified person not having knowledge of urdu cannot understand, not to talk of a common man.It is a common experience that when a person receives the copies/extracts of the revenue record pertaining to the land owned , the record contains such complex terms as are not in common use and he has to remain at the goodwill and trust of the issuing authority.Unable to decipher and understand such archaic terms having been in use since centuries, many persons become victims of fraudsters.Moreover, a large number of officers, particularly, the IAS Cadre belonging to Hindi speaking states having little knowledge of Urdu fail to understand the record in Urdu .Even the local officers having little knowledge of Urdu find it difficult to understand the revenue terms, numbers and quantities written in complex language and not in Indo Arabic numerals such as 1, 2, 3..etc howsoever hard they try to learn Urdu.As such, they find it difficult to dispose of the disputes pertaining to land promptly.As Urdu has lost its ground in most of the parts of Jammu Division over the last few years, it is not read by many people.Thus, the people, in general,can’t read the record of their own land, though they may have the copies of it.On the other hand, English is read and understood by a large number of people of our state. So the decision of the Government to demystify the revenue record is laudable.
Ashok Sharma,
Housing Colony, Udhampur.

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