Dealing with land in any way like purchasing , selling , effecting and recording mutations etc, one has not only to be in know of large number of land records and revenue terms that had to be used in the course of the transaction but the mystified or obscured language used and even how it was interpreted. Even writing of the mystified language was made bewildering and hard, so to say to decipher it. Moreover, that was true of numerals used which too were written as if in a language to be known by and connected to the Revenue Department only. This used to be the ”unwritten” procedure and practice which was, however, strictly implemented and passed on to next crop of employees that would replace the older rather the seniors attaining superannuation to keep the ”tradition” alive , sustained and confined only to those working in the fields and otherwise and purposefully not made known to the general masses. That all means that despite being literate, one was totally illiterate or rendered so because one could not put two and two together after going through what was written about and with reference to vital terms of a land document like Jamabandi or the records of rights of ownership of the land, Khaata or landholding , Khasra or survey number of the plot of the land , Khewat or landholder’s entire holding or even Naqal or the copy of the entire information about the land records and so on and so forth . Wanton usage of cryptic terms by the field and other staff of the concerned Department had assumed a de-jure status almost on universal basis projected as unchallengeable or at least earnestly required in Jammu and Kashmir. Not only such an impregnable system remained an exclusive domain of the core field employees of the Revenue Department and established their indispensability all about it but at will altering or misrepresenting such records for some sure ”consideration” too used to take place . Such an intricately woven system often led to frauds, wanton corruption, court cases and litigations between the buyers and the sellers while the real ones behind the manipulation remained unscathed . Thanks to the Information Technology revolution, digitization of land records was decided to be introduced and e-office implementation started in the Revenue Department coupled with demystifying revenue records and using readable versions of the narrative/ details and terminology of the land particulars. This undoubtedly meant introducing reforms and much needed improvement in the basic but obsolete functioning of the Department which depicted monopoly of its own class . These measures have really worked to largely address the hardships of the people and to further make things easy, the Government of Jammu and Kashmir has decided to put an end to decades’ long system of archaic terminology to be replaced with easy, understandable and simple languages and relevant papers required to be issued on demand in languages like Urdu, Hindi and English. Further, to pre-empt any attempts to circumvent the revised simple system for obvious reasons, standard formats have been designed and instructions passed on to interpret the records suitably on them. The need of demystifying of records had been long felt and towards that end persistently attention of the authorities was being drawn so that the cycle of rampant corruption, misrepresentation and frauds could somehow be broken. Not only the implementation of the revised and reformed process must, now, be strictly ensured but a mechanism must be in place to monitor the levels of the compliance of the official directives. In this context, since the concerned Deputy Commissioners have been entrusted with the duties of ensuring and enforcing compliance of the new procedure, we hope all the requisite revenue records would not only be issued but prepared too in simple, easy, unambiguous and understandable mode in any of the three languages in a transparent way by the UT Revenue Department.
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