Raksha Bhoomi and Computerization of Land Records

Defence Estates Service maintains two types of important lands registers. One register is for lands within Cantonments and the other register is for lands outside Cantonments. The former register is called General Lands Register (GLR) and the latter register is called Military Lands Register (MLR). Both the registers, record survey no wise the ownership of land, its area, who occupies it, any transfer/sale transaction and other summary details. Both the registers are maintained in every DEO Circle. GLR is maintained in every Cantonment Board office. Each office maintains multiple volumes of both these registers. There are 62 Cantonment Board offices and 37 DEO Circles.
 
In 2007, Raksha Bhoomi software was envisaged to store electronically the information in both these registers in all the DEO and CEO offices. The features of Raksha Bhoomi are these: Land records data from various offices can be consolidated at one place. Earlier with manual registers this consolidation was not possible. Therefore computerization of this important data with the facility to generate state-wise and country-wise reports was undertaken along with the preparation of software for managing this data.
 
The software after its development in the year 2007 has undergone numerous version changes and a stable version 3.3 was released in the year 2011. These changes were necessitated due to huge differences in record management in various offices, the local variations in various leases given during British time and different systems of revenue and land records being followed in various states.
 
The software has been installed in all 62 Cantonment Boards and all 37 Defence Estate Offices. Data entry, verification and authentication has been completed by all the field offices. The entire data has been compiled. The MLR data-Cd was released by Hon’ble Raksha Mantriji on 13th July, 2011.