As the Indian government puts increasing faith in technology to help solve the nation's thorniest problems—including a complete tech-based overhaul of its welfare system—Bhoomi presents a cautionary tale: that technology, even at its most successful, can only be a part of the solution.
“(Officials) kind of look at technology to be a panacea for everything, which cannot be. The political will is the most important thing,” said Rajeev Chawla, the government administrator who created Bhoomi.
For Yashoda Puttappa, Bhoomi merely marked another setback in her family's six-decade struggle to recover a plot of 1.6 hectares (four acres) she said was illegally taken from her grandfather in the 1940s as supposed repayment of a loan from a wealthy upper-caste neighbor. She feels that Bhoomi cemented the competing claim.
“In the computer, the name is of that man, the dominant caste, which is only going to make this harder,” said Puttappa, a land rights activist.
Bhoomi is good, she said, for preventing future land disputes, by making it more difficult to forge documents, but it also gives a patina of legitimacy to old land grabs.
“Whatever we lost, we can't get back,” she said.
In this country, a third the size of the U.S. and four times as populous, land supports hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers and is often the only inheritance they pass to their children.
It has also become a hugely profitable investment, as India's expanding cities grow desperate for new space for office complexes and housing developments.
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