UAE: New scheme for non-resident Keralites to settle land disputes announced

Non-resident Keralites facing land disputes back home will have a forum in the UAE to settle their issues, a minister in the Kerala cabinet has said.

The South Indian state’s Revenue Minister K Rajan said Monday that a special cell under the Land Revenue Commission would be set up in July. The online forum would accept applications from Keralite expatriates living in the UAE.

K Rajan said he is aware expatriate Malayalees are facing several issues related to their land back home. “This would be launched as a pilot project in the UAE, where a large Malayalee diaspora resides. The project would be launched in other countries in later phases as well,” said the minister.

An announcement in this regard will be made at the Loka Kerala Sabha to be held in Thiruvananthapuram on June 17 and 18, Rajan said.

All files submitted on this forum would be scrutinised and settled through the revenue Adalat held every six months. The project is a fast-track green channel to address land and revenue-related issues UAE Keralites face.

“Depending on its success, we would hold the Adalat here in the UAE. If not possible, we would old them online,” he stated during a media interaction in Dubai on Monday.

Moreover, Rajan said the State has already begun facilitating an online land tax payment system for Keralites abroad. “We have begun issuing e-pattayams (title deeds) with a QR code that links to the documents of the plots in the digital locker of the revenue department,” he added. The minister said the state aims to reduce visits to village offices and provide a unified property card which would contain all documents related to the land in the department’s digital locker.

Last month, the state made a landmark move to unify property ownership by providing landlords with a unique 13- digit thandaper number. Owners of multiple land holdings would be allotted a single thandaper, a single revenue record of property instead of multiple ones, which was the practice so far.

Under the new system, parcels of land an individual own in the State would be provided with a unique 13-digit number. The earlier system provided land owners with single to five-digit numbers; if an individual had more than one plot of land in more than one village, they would have different thandaper numbers.

Rajan said the revenue department implemented the revolutionary reforms, and the government is spending over Rs8 billion on a digital survey of the State. Moreover, Kerala would launch an integrated portal to handle all land-related documents that come under various departments.

• India