MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 82 of 100

Correct — option (3), which nominates statements A, C and D. SVAMITVA is a Central Sector Scheme of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj whose full name — Survey of Villages and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas — already tells you what the question turns on. It surveys the abadi, the inhabited land of a village, using drones and a Continuously Operating Reference Station network, and issues a Record of Rights, in the form of a property card, to the owner of each village household. Take the statements one by one. Statement A is the scheme's headline objective as the ministry itself states it: to bring financial stability to citizens in rural India by enabling them to use their property as a financial asset for taking loans and other financial benefits. Millions of rural households occupy homes they can prove no title to, which is exactly what makes that property useless as collateral; a property card turns dead capital into bankable security, and this is the whole economic point of the exercise. Statement C is likewise an official objective — accurate mapping and clear ownership are expected to reduce property related disputes, which in rural India consume years of litigation over boundaries and inheritance. Statement D is official too: the survey allows accurate determination of property tax, which accrues directly to the Gram Panchayat in States where the power has been devolved, and otherwise to the State exchequer — a Gram Panchayat that does not know what property exists in its village cannot tax it. That leaves statement B, and it fails on a single word. The ministry's objective is the creation of accurate land records for RURAL planning; SVAMITVA operates in the inhabited areas of villages and nowhere else, and urban planning is the business of a different set of institutions altogether. A candidate who reads statement B quickly sees a true-sounding phrase, 'create precise land records', and passes over the word that makes it false. Since A, C and D stand and B does not, option (3) is the answer and option (4), 'All of the above', cannot be.

• (1)Only A — 'Only A' understates the scheme by treating it as a credit programme and nothing more. Financial stability through the use of property as a bankable asset is indeed the objective the ministry names first, and a candidate who has read only a headline about property cards unlocking loans will stop there. But the ministry's own statement of objectives is a list, not a single line, and it includes the reduction of property related disputes and the determination of property tax alongside the credit aim, together with the creation of GIS survey infrastructure that any department can use and support for better-quality Gram Panchayat Development Plans. Statements C and D reproduce two of those objectives almost in the ministry's words, so both have to be admitted. In a 'which of the following are the objectives' question the task is to admit every statement that stands and exclude only those that fail; choosing the narrowest option is not caution but a wrong answer.
• (2)B, C and D — This option makes the opposite mistake to option (1): it drops the statement that is most plainly true and keeps the one that is false. Statement A is the scheme's flagship objective, so no correct combination can exclude it, and statement B is the one defective item in the list because SVAMITVA's land records are made for rural planning, not urban. The scheme's remit is the abadi area of villages, the inhabited land that revenue records in most States had never mapped, in contrast to agricultural land which had long been surveyed and recorded. Urban property is recorded by municipal bodies and by State urban development departments under an entirely separate legal and administrative regime. A combination that both omits a true statement and includes a false one is doubly wrong, and noticing that it excludes A is the quickest way to strike it out.
• (4)All of the above — 'All of the above' can only be right if every statement in the list survives scrutiny, and statement B does not. The word doing the damage is 'urban'. Everything else in statement B is accurate — SVAMITVA does create precise land records, and it does so for planning — but the planning in question is rural, and the ministry's own statement of the objective reads 'creation of accurate land records for rural planning'. Escape options of this kind are offered freely in this paper, and they are worth treating as an invitation to check the weakest statement rather than as a shortcut. The discipline that saves the mark is mechanical: mark each statement true or false on its own before you look at the four combinations, then pick the combination that matches your marks. A candidate who verifies A, C and D and then reaches for 'All of the above' out of momentum has done all the work and thrown away the result.

SVAMITVA answers a specific gap in Indian land administration. Agricultural land in most States has been surveyed and recorded for over a century, but the abadi — the inhabited part of a village, where the houses actually stand — was frequently left unsurveyed, so residents held homes they occupied by custom and could not prove by document. The scheme, a Central Sector Scheme of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj with the Survey of India as technology implementation agency, flies drones over the abadi, produces ortho-rectified imagery of a few centimetres' resolution against a Continuously Operating Reference Station network, verifies the boundaries with the residents and the revenue staff, and issues each owner a property card constituting a Record of Rights. Its declared objectives follow from that: financial stability, because a titled house can be mortgaged; a reduction in property disputes, because boundaries are recorded rather than remembered; accurate determination of property tax, because a Gram Panchayat can now see what it may assess; the creation of GIS survey infrastructure that other departments can reuse; and better Gram Panchayat Development Plans built on real maps. The pilot phase was launched by the Prime Minister on 24 April 2020, National Panchayati Raj Day, with the first property cards distributed on 11 October 2020 in six pilot States including Maharashtra.

Central schemes are examined by MPSC in a predictable way — the ministry that runs them, the year of launch, the coverage, and the list of stated objectives — and the objectives are the version that most often appears as a statement question, because a list of five official objectives can be turned into four statements of which one has been quietly corrupted. The corruption is almost always a single word: a ministry changed, a year moved, a number altered, or, as here, 'rural' changed to 'urban'. The habit that beats this format is reading each statement to its end and asking what single word would have to be false for the statement to fail, rather than reacting to the general shape of a familiar-sounding sentence. SVAMITVA has a particular claim on a Maharashtra candidate's attention: the State was one of the six in which the pilot ran and where the first property cards were handed out in October 2020, and its own rural development department runs the scheme as the SVAMITVA Yojana. Note too the way the item is labelled — the statements here are marked A. to D. in upper case, while other questions in this paper use lower-case a. to d. and some use Roman numerals. Always answer using the labels your own question prints; the Commission does not use one scheme throughout the paper.

• SVAMITVA stands for Survey of Villages and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas, and it is a Central Sector Scheme of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj with the Survey of India as its technology implementation agency.
• Its stated objectives include bringing financial stability to rural citizens by letting them use property as an asset for loans, creating accurate land records for RURAL planning, reducing property related disputes, and enabling accurate determination of property tax.
• The scheme surveys the abadi or inhabited area of villages with drones and a Continuously Operating Reference Station network, and issues a Record of Rights as a property card to each village household owner.
• The pilot phase was launched by the Prime Minister on 24 April 2020, National Panchayati Raj Day, and the first property cards were distributed on 11 October 2020 in six pilot States including Maharashtra.
• Property tax determined from the survey accrues directly to the Gram Panchayat in States where that power has been devolved, and otherwise to the State exchequer.

• Reading 'urban planning' as 'rural planning' in a statement about SVAMITVA, which is the single word this question is built on
• Choosing 'All of the above' after verifying three statements, without testing the fourth — this paper offers that escape option ten times across its four hundred options, and being offered is not evidence of being right
• Treating SVAMITVA as a loan or credit scheme alone, when the property card is the instrument and credit is only one of several declared objectives
• Confusing SVAMITVA, which maps the inhabited abadi area of villages, with land-record schemes covering agricultural land or with urban property registers maintained by municipal bodies

Scheme questions in MPSC papers come in four shapes — which ministry runs it, when it was launched, whom or what it covers, and what its objectives are — and this paper uses the objectives form, which is the hardest of the four because it requires the candidate to check several claims rather than recall one. The examiner's usual method is to reproduce three objectives faithfully from the ministry's own text and corrupt the fourth by a single word, so that the false statement reads perfectly well and fails only on inspection. The efficient preparation is a five-line note for each major scheme holding the ministry, the launch date, the coverage, the objectives and the implementing agency, since almost every question that can be built from a scheme can be answered from those five lines. For SVAMITVA in particular, expect variants naming the wrong ministry, the wrong technology partner, or the wrong kind of land, and expect Maharashtra's place among the pilot States to be worth a mark on its own.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The SVAMITVA scheme of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj surveys which category of land ?

  • (a)Agricultural land held by cultivators in revenue villages
  • (b)The abadi or inhabited area of villages
  • (c)Forest land under the control of the State forest departments
  • (d)Land within the limits of municipal corporations

  Answer(b) The abadi or inhabited area of villages — the scheme exists precisely because agricultural land had long been surveyed and recorded in most States while the inhabited part of the village had not, leaving residents unable to prove title to the houses they lived in. Drone survey of the abadi produces the map from which a property card, constituting a Record of Rights, is issued to each owner.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which agency works with the Ministry of Panchayati Raj as the technology implementation agency for SVAMITVA ?

  • (a)The Survey of India
  • (b)The Indian Space Research Organisation
  • (c)The National Informatics Centre
  • (d)The Geological Survey of India

  Answer(a) The Survey of India — the ministry's implementation framework lists it as the technology implementation agency, and it runs the drone survey and the Continuously Operating Reference Station network that gives the mapping its centimetre-level accuracy. The Geological Survey of India, named in the last option, maps the country's geology and mineral resources and has no role in this scheme.