A Law Frozen in Settlement Registers

Laws, like maps, must reflect the terrain they seek to govern. When the terrain changes but the map remains frozen in time, governance turns arbitrary, litigation multiplies, and public trust erodes. The Jammu & Kashmir Land Revenue Act stands today at precisely this crossroads. While land records across the Union Territory have undergone near-complete digitisation, the legal framework governing those records remains anchored in a world of handwritten registers, subsistence agriculture, feudal tenancy, and colonial revenue extraction.
This contradiction is no longer academic. It manifests daily in revenue offices, mutation disputes, land-use conflicts, infrastructure projects, agrarian reform bottlenecks, and citizen grievances. Digitised jamabandies speak the language of the 21st century; the Land Revenue Act continues to speak the dialect of settlement officers from a bygone era.

The time has come not merely to amend the Act, but to rewrite it fundamentally, aligning it with contemporary land realities, demographic pressures, climate stress, and digital governance. At the heart of the Land Revenue Act lies its definition of “land”—a definition that presumes cultivation as the default purpose. This assumption was valid when the Act was framed. It is dangerously misleading today. Across Jammu & Kashmir, land that was once uniformly agricultural has fragmented into diverse and legally distinct uses:

Orchard-based horticulture, now a major economic driver
Residential expansions swallowing village commons and fields
Commercial exploitation through shops, hotels, workshops, and warehouses
Public infrastructure—roads, railways, national highways, power corridors, dams, and government buildings
Yet, the Act treats all land as if it were ploughed by bullocks and irrigated by kulhs.

When law refuses to recognise differentiated land use, it:

Distorts valuation
Confuses mutation entries
Complicates compensation in acquisitions
Encourages misuse and manipulation
Proposed Structural Reform

The revised Act must statutorily classify land as:

Agricultural land (primary and protected)
Horticulture land
Residential land
Commercial/industrial land
Public infrastructure and acquired land

Each category must have distinct legal treatment, especially regarding conversion, valuation, mutation, and regulatory oversight. The continued presence of tenant definitions in the Land Revenue Act represents one of its most glaring anachronisms. The Act still assumes a socio-economic order where landlords leased land to tenants, revenue was assessed accordingly, and tenancy was a normal mode of cultivation. Agrarian reforms in Jammu & Kashmir were among the most radical in the country. Ownership rights were vested, intermediary interests abolished, and tenancy as an institution dismantled. In contemporary society.

Few provisions expose the fossilised nature of the Act more clearly than its continued references to lagan, malia, and cess. These were instruments of revenue extraction in an agrarian economy where land revenue was the primary source of state income.

Today:

These charges are not levied
They have no accounting mechanism
They find no place in government budgets
Their presence in law is not merely redundant—it is misleading.
Reform Proposal
Delete all references to lagan, malia, and cess
Align revenue law with contemporary fiscal statutes
Clearly state that land records serve administrative and legal—not revenue-collection—functions

The Land Revenue Act recognises a bewildering variety of mutations, many of which were designed to record temporary or customary agrarian arrangements. Names such as sehat kasht, jinder graith, and others may still appear on official portals, but their relevance has vanished. In the modern legal ecosystem, only three mutations have clear legitimacy:

Inheritance
Sale deed
Gift deed

All others:

Complicate digital architecture
Confuse citizens
Provide scope for misuse
Reform Proposal
Statutorily recognise only essential mutation types
Delete obsolete categories from the Act and digital platforms
Make mutation law deed-centric and inheritance-centric

The ceiling of 100 kanals prescribed under the Act reflects settlement-era assumptions about family size and land distribution. Today, landholdings are fragmented through generations of inheritance. In many villages, an entire extended family may not collectively hold 30 kanals. The Act contains detailed classifications of soil that were meaningful when revenue assessment depended on fertility. Digitisation has fundamentally altered revenue administration. No official—patwari, girdawar, or tehsildar—can now unilaterally alter records without leaving a digital trail. Yet the Act still presumes manual discretion. Historically, Fard-e-Partal evolved as an inspection register. Over time, it became a shadow instrument for altering records. In a digitised system, this is unacceptable.

This structure must become the spine of the revised Act. The law should mirror the digital record—not the other way around. In essence, the modern Land Revenue Act is nothing but the legal codification of digitised jamabandi.

Climate stress has rewritten irrigation reality. Traditional sources have dried up or been diverted for drinking water. New sources—tube wells, lift schemes, dams—have emerged. Reading jamabandi before villagers is a democratic exercise only if grievances are actually resolved. Otherwise, it becomes ritualistic. Thousands of Section 8 mutations remain pending. Sections 6, 7, and 12 impose restrictions that have lost reformist relevance.
The contradiction is stark: a digitised present governed by an analogue past. Jammu & Kashmir cannot aspire to transparent land governance while clinging to a law drafted for settlement registers and feudal relations. Modernisation of records without modernisation of law is institutional hypocrisy.

The author can be mailed at miramin354@gmail.com