Which of the following are the objectives of the ‘SVAMITVA’ Scheme ?
A. Ensure financial stability to villagers by letting them use their property to take loans.
B. Create precise land records for urb

Question

Which of the following are the objectives of the ‘SVAMITVA’ Scheme ?
A. Ensure financial stability to villagers by letting them use their property to take loans.
B. Create precise land records for urban planning and implementation.
C. Lessen property related disputes.
D. Determine property tax.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (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.  (b) 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.  (d) '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.

Concept: 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.

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