Automating property in peri-urban India: digital truth, alignment, and calculation

Keywords: Digital geography, urban geography, South Asia, critical geography, land
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Over the past six years the Indian government’s have pursued a programme of digitised mapping, algorithmic surveyance and automated governance that seek to transform property relations in the countryside and incorporate land into new large-scale data systems. While programmes to digitise cadastral records have been ongoing for some time, these new schemes seek to both link digitised land records with real-time mapping and automated administration platforms, and construct digitised infrastructures through which property-holders can leverage their assets for both public and financial services. This paper focuses on the Indian government's SVAMITVA programme, which aims to digitally map, enclose and title all commonly-held village land across the country using a host of new UAV and mapping technologies.The outcome of the SVAMITVA programme entails a 'truthing' where new digitized property records are publically etched into the soil and database.

The paper draws from preliminary ethnographic research with engineers and bureaucrats charged with deploying the programme in the field. The paper explores how diverse property regimes are rendered legible in data-systems, how bureaucrats and engineers approximate plots, commensurate claims with records, align complex rights with normative property registers, and "truth" land boundaries within hotly contested territories. While policy advocates purport that new property governance technology simply provides clarity to otherwise opaque rural property regimes, in this paper I argue that digitally enclosing land not only takes a great deal of provisional and imaginative work but also produces new property regimes shaped by digitally-enhanced aesthetics and politics of caste and class.