Bengal: Report Unearths ‘Scam’ on Deletion of Barga Records From ePortal

Kolkata: Amid the ongoing panchayat election campaign, a scam suggesting “wilful deletion” of barga (sharecropper) records of patta-holding (land deed holders) tillers of the state has been unearthed by a Bengali daily, Ganashakti, on Sunday. The newspaper termed it as “one the biggest digital scams” in the state after Independence.

According to a report published in the Left-oriented newspaper, land owners are clearly the beneficiaries after the government portal, e bhuchitra, showed the land records of the barga tillers (tenant farmers who give part of the crop as rent) as deleted.

Notably, the entire land records in the state are now digitised through this online portal, which is monitored by officers of the land and land records department.

Recall that the Mamata Banerjee cabinet has taken a decision to change the nature of government land from leasehold to freehold, and has embarked on selling government land. Now the government is eyeing barga land for sale, the report alleged.

During the Left Front regime before 2011, there were 15 lakh recorded bargadaars (sharecroppers) in the state. A sizeable portion of those names are being silently removed from the land records, the Ganashakti report said.

A bargadaar can only be evicted through a court process, yet the land will always be known as barga land, which is why such a “digital scam” has taken place in the bid to free these from barga tenants, alleged the report, adding that the deletion of records would impact over 2 million people, as the “discrepancies” in records are on a “huge scale”.

The report claimed that because of the ongoing panchayat elections, there are efforts by the authorities to keep the scam under a wraps. However, the vastness of the scam, as per the Bengali daily, was perturbing even officers of the land and land records department.

According to a source quoted by Ganashakti, the deletion of records is happening from the central database of the department, situated at the Survey Building in Kolkata.

The central database falls under the land reforms department's director of land records and survey. The source quoted in the report alleged that it was from this database that the names of bargadaars had been deleted in Bankura district’s Kajakura Mouza, Darjeeling district’s Naxalbari’s Lalmon Mouza, Matigora blocks, Chamta Mouza, Hooghly district’s Chanditala 2 blocks and Begumpur.

Recently, from Singur's Kismat block’s Apurbapur Mouzas plot no 509 and 508, also, the names of bargadaars was found deleted, the report adds.

According to the report, to oust the bargadaars from the land, a bribe is paid @ Rs 30,000 for one decimal of land (436 sq feet of land). From 10 cents of land, Rs 1 lakh is being collected to free the land from bargadaars, it alleged.

The reports also cited some officers of the land reforms department saying that in each of the districts, “agents had taken over the operations in chain link with the central database to oust bargadaars from their land”.

The report further alleged cyber fraud within the portal and said that only a proper investigation could unravel how digitised passwords were used to delete so many names from the portal.

As per the report, after a bargas’ names are deleted from the record, the land is being sold off, and buyers are doing instant mutation of the land. In many cases, the land's characteristics are being changed from agricultural land to  liveable land through conversion, it added.

It may be recalled that during the model land reforms started in the state in 1977 by the Left Front, many legal safeguards had been made for patta right holders. It had ensured that barga land cannot be denoted as barga-free land. Hence, the scamsters are now using e-fraud to free the land of barga records, the report alleged.