Published Feb 18, 2026 | 11:54 AM ⚊ Updated Feb 18, 2026 | 12:01 PM
Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said the state has created a record by distributing title deeds to 2.20 lakh families.
Synopsis: Amendments to the Karnataka Land Reforms Act, 2017, enabled the rollout of the initiative. The changes allowed residents, especially agricultural labourers and those from the marginalised communities, to register themselves as owners of houses built on government land they have been occupying.
Karnataka has distributed title deeds to more than one lakh beneficiaries as part of the Bhoo (Land) Guarantee Scheme, a promise the Congress party had made.
Distributing the title deeds in Haveri on 14 February, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said the state has set a record by distributing title deeds.
“We are distributing title deeds to one lakh beneficiaries for the second time through the Revenue Department. So far, we have created a record by distributing title deeds to 2.20 lakh families,” Siddaramaiah said at the Bhoo Guarantee Samarpana Samavesha, which coincided with the government’s celebration of 1,000 days in office.
Most beneficiaries were families from poorer socio-economic segments, agricultural labourers, and the working class in unrecognised habitations — whose houses did not exist in any government record.
Officials said amendments to the Karnataka Land Reforms Act, 2017, enabled the rollout of the initiative. The changes allowed residents, especially agricultural labourers and those from the marginalised communities, to register themselves as owners of houses built on government land they have been occupying.
Ever since the Congress assumed power in May 2023, the Revenue Department has introduced several measures aimed at overhauling the land records system. The primary aim has been to digitise and map lands across the state to ensure accuracy in records and guarantee clear ownership rights.
“Our achievement over the past 1,000 days is truly historic — something never accomplished before. In this short span, we have reached the doorsteps of the people and distributed title deeds to 2.2 lakh families, bringing security and dignity to their lives,” Revenue Minister Krishna Byre Gowda said in a statement.
The decision to roll out the scheme came amid the Opposition’s attempts to amplify a perceived leadership tussle between Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and his deputy DK Shivakumar.
The first five guarantee schemes – Gruha Lakshmi, Gruha Jyoti, Anna Bhagya, Shakti and Yuva Nidhi – were implemented after the Congress came to power. An independent study on the impact of the schemes observed that they had a positive impact on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as envisioned by the United Nations, along with raising the living standards of women.
However, questions have been raised about the expenditure incurred on these guarantee schemes. According to a report from the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), the pre-poll guarantees contributed to the state’s revenue deficit of ₹9,271 crore. Consequently, the fiscal deficit of the state also increased from ₹46,623 crore in 2022-23 to ₹65,522 crore in 2023-24.
Ensuring the ‘Bhoo Guarantee’
“Across taluk record rooms in Karnataka, decades-old land documents lay in poor condition. The department initiated a large-scale digitisation drive to scan these records and make them accessible online, allowing citizens to download copies through the Bhoo Suraksha website upon payment of the prescribed government fee,” Swamy Gowda, a tahsildar in the Revenue Department, told South First.
“Earlier, such clusters of houses would not have any rights over their property. They built unauthorised houses, so they did not have documents. But after the amendment, these residents were able to get hakku patras (title deeds) and certificates after we declared the clusters as revenue villages,” he added.
The government has a plan to distribute 1,39,476 more title deeds.
Of the state’s 240 taluks, the digitisation process has been completed in 100 so far, with nearly 69 crore pages scanned to date.
“We are guaranteeing authenticated land record documents. Without certified records, ownership becomes uncertain and problematic,” Gowda said.
Additionally, the department had also initiated Aadhaar seeding, wherein every parcel of land is seeded to the owner’s Aadhaar number. The initiative, which was launched in parallel with the Bhoo Suraksha in a bid to prevent fraudulent and duplicate transactions, has achieved 85 percent coverage so far, Gowda said.
The “Land Beat” initiative, which was launched to identify and protect the lands of the various departments, including revenue and forest departments, from encroachment, has achieved a progress of 95 percent.
As part of the initiative, each property is mapped on an app using GPS coordinates. The department officers are tasked with visiting each site to check for encroachments. They report any issues of encroachment directly through the app, and steps are taken to remove encroachments.
Now, the government is planning the second phase of this initiative, wherein scale-to-scale sketches of the encroached land will be done by the surveyor before taking any legal action against the encroacher. The next step would be to issue a notice to the encroacher before initiating legal action.
The government has also launched a software titled E-Pouthi, with a mission to cleanse land records and empower rightful heirs. Steps have been taken to identify and transfer land registered in the names of deceased persons to their legal heirs, bringing long-awaited relief to thousands of families.
In a first-of-its-kind move, the Revenue Department has started delivering updated Pahani (land records) directly to the doorsteps of farmers in a bid to ensure transparency and ease in access to land rights.
Post Aadhaar seeding, the department found that 45 lakh land parcels were attached to deceased owners. Until now, applications of 14,48,536 survey numbers (of deceased owners) have been cleared under the E-Pouthi scheme.
Another major challenge was the pendency of cases in revenue courts.
“When this government came to power, there were 37,787 cases that were pending for over five years and 59,339 cases that were pending for more than one year,” the Revenue Minister said in response to a question in the legislative council in December 2025.
Tahsildar Gowda said that pending cases before the tahsildar’s courts have now come down from 10,774 in May 2023 to 488. The deadline to dispose of cases in the tahsildar’s courts is three months. The average days for one case earlier was 212 days. “This has now come down to 67,” Gowda said.
While these are only some of the initiatives introduced by the Revenue Department, the government plans to build on them to formalise what it calls a “guarantee” of secure and transparent land ownership.
(Edited by Majnu Babu).
