Digitisation of land records — hailed by the Centre as a ‘game changer’ for farmers — could turn out to be just another can of worms in Madhya Pradesh, where scammers have allegedly converted government land into private by hacking the security code of the land record management software, minting hundreds of crores.
In some cases, the scamsters falsified records of non-existing land through the portal and availed loans from different banks, say sources, adding that farmers often had no clue that loans had been taken by mortgaging their land.
There are rising complaints that scammers are laying their hands on login IDs and passwords of the software ‘MPWEBGIS’ to tamper with land records. While whistle blowers accuse the software firm of operating an insecure system, the company denies this.
In one of the most recent cases, the Morena collector has written to the commissioner-land records (CLR), expressing serious concern over “misuse of the MPWEBGIS portal”. He has pointed out two cases where government land was converted into private land through “unauthorised access of the portal using ID and password”. “We are getting regular complaints on this portal, which shows working on it without adequate security measures is risky. Therefore with utmost request it is being informed that without adequate security measures working on WEB GIS is not possible,” collector Vinod Sharma wrote in his letter (dated June 12) to CLR. TOI has a copy of it.
