New Delhi, Aug. 26: The rural development ministry today announced a new scheme, a modified version of two existing ones, to help farmers be a mouse click away from all they want to know about their land.

Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh said the National Land Records Modernisation Programme would give a farmer “all the details” of his land.

“He will be able to take printouts of all his documents in the quickest possible way. This will also enable a farmer to submit his papers in time for loans and he doesn’t need to run around for the required papers that a bank asks for,” Singh said.

“Also, neither private players nor any other agency will be able to dupe the farmer as he will himself know what the actual market price of his land is.”

But sources conceded that the problems that dogged the two earlier plans — Strengthening of Revenue Administration and Updating of Land Records scheme and the Computerisation of Land Records programme — would hobble the new scheme, too.

According to records released by the ministry today, only Bengal and 12 other states and Union territories among the 35 are in a position to provide farmers records of rights on demand.

But ministry officials said these states — Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Sikkim, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Bengal — were yet to update the records.

“These states have just fed data available to them. There are still no records of lands that haven’t been registered. Therein lies the problem,” Singh said.

“There are some states like Bihar, which was given Rs 25 crore for the scheme last year. Leave alone implementing the scheme, the state government hasn’t even given the ministry an account of the amount it has been given,” the minister, who happens to be from Bihar, added.

The government, however, hopes the new programme, for which the Centre will bear Rs 3,098 crore and the states Rs 2,558 crore, will help it achieve its long-term goal of clearing the title system.

The scheme will include computerisation of land records, survey, wherever required, inter-linking of registration, high-resolution satellite imagery/aerial photography and Survey of India and Forest Survey of India maps.

The two earlier schemes, started in 1988-89, were aimed at providing landowners with computerised copies of ownership, crop and tenancy and updated copies of records of rights, but Singh said they “progressed in a disconcerted manner”.

Because of the “inherent disconnect in administering” the schemes separately, “it hasn’t been possible to monitor the progress towards even the basic common goal of computerisation of land records”, he said, explaining the logic behind their merger.