G.N. Nagaraj, a state Communist Party leader, hailed Bhoomi as ‘'wonderful software,” but it was only of “very, very small, limited help.” The land mafia can still pressure the officials entering the records into the computer to help them steal land, he said.
Chawla said Bhoomi was designed to prevent new disputes from entering the system, but he acknowledged it wasn't foolproof. Officials were still required to process land sales. They could be bribed and so could witnesses identifying sellers, he said.
Bhoomi's transparency did help Goutham Venki in his fight to get back land that had been taken long ago from his great grandfather by a powerful landlord.
He and about a dozen from his community of migrant stoneworkers looked up their dispossessed land at the Bhoomi office in 2004 and found it had been registered to a real estate developer, who had just bought it from the landlord.
Venki sued—and won. But he still had to borrow Rs 120,000 at 60 percent interest from a loan shark to bribe bureaucrats to change the Bhoomi record back into his name.
A month later, the real estate developer appealed. And the decades' old land dispute drags on, like so many of Karnataka's land battles.
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