Bhoomi Rashi

Everyone will Benefit

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Govt. of India has
designed Bhoomi Rashi as a single point platform for online
processing of land acquisition notifications to accelerate highway
infrastructure development projects in India.
Bhoomi Rashi will fast track the process of land acquisition and
result in greater benefits for all stakeholders. Farmers, landowners,
contractors and investors will benefit from the transparency
introduced by the portal in the land acquisition process.
The Bhoomi Rashi portal will be a new milestone in the nation’s
journey towards DIGITISATION and TRANSPARENCY.

The Need for Land Acquisition

Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) is engaged
in developing India’s road infrastructure sector and executes its
projects through various implementation agencies, viz. National
Highways Authority of India (NHAI), National Highways & Infrastructure
Development Company Ltd. (NHIDCL) and State PWDs. The objective
of the Ministry is to fast-track economic growth, for which improved
road connectivity, specifically expansion and upgradation of the
National Highways network, is of vital importance.

The vision of Shri. Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister, Road Transport

& Highways, is to bring about large scale transformation of system
and structure by re-engineering current processes and procedures.
To achieve this, MoRTH has undertaken a complete review of the
key issues related to incumbent organization structures, processes
and systems, including, inter-alia, streamlining key process steps like
land acquisition.

Land Acquisition is critical for the commencement and completion

of construction of National Highways, which begins once the
alignment plan and land acquisition plan for a specific project, are
approved. The process starts with the appointment of a revenue
functionary of the State Government as Competent Authority for
Land Acquisition (CALA) for each NH Project. It ends at taking of
physical possession of the land by the implementing authority and
disbursal of compensation to each affected/interested party.
Earlier Challenges in Land
Acquisition
The critical aspect of a National Highway construction/upgradation
project is the timely availability of land. In many cases, it had become
a major bottleneck on account of slow procedures and delay in
issuance of notifications.
The entire land acquisition process was time consuming and lacked
transparency earlier, leading to unforeseen delays. It involved drafting
and publication of multiple notifications, each of which would pass
through several authorities for processing/approval before its final
publication. The processing of these notifications manually was
time-consuming and prone to errors.
Further, the funds out of which compensation was to be paid for land
acquired under the National Highways Act 1956, were placed solely
at the disposal of the Competent Authority for Land Acquisition
(CALA). For NHAI projects and National Highways Interconnectivity
Improvement Projects (NHIIP), these funds were placed in a joint
account held in the name of CALA and Project Director (PD). Funds
were disbursed by CALA after declaration and finalization of land
acquisition awards.
Since Land Acquisition involves huge amounts of Compensation
and the whole process takes place over a prolonged period, these
funds were unnecessarily parked in CALA’s account for a long time,
thereby, resulting in delays in projects.

Bottlenecks in manual
procedure of Land Acquisition
• Parking of huge Government funds with CALAs
• Mismatch or Errors in entries like Survey Numbers, Village
Name, name of CALA etc.
• Physical movement/processing of draft Notifications for their
publication in the Gazette of India-Extra Ordinary, resulting
in delay
• Multiple Entries of Land Parties by CALA at every subsequent stage
• Non transparency in determination and disbursal of compensation
Bhoomi Rashi
The Solution
The need of the hour was workflow based automation of the
present Land Acquisition process for NH projects . Development
and operationalization of a comprehensive web-based portal was
the answer.
This portal would enhance the efficiency of the land acquisition
process, ensure transparency and accountability, and result in
e-transfer of benefits directly to the accounts of the beneficiaries.
Its benefits would be faster process completion, transparent
fund transfer to the land owners/beneficiaries and reduction of
procedural errors.

The Making of Bhoomi Rashi

MoRTH decided to develop an online Land Acquisition (LA) system
which would provide linkage across authorities, eliminate the need
of physical copy, reduce the formatting errors/clerical mistakes
and enable easy tracking of the draft notification.
The Land Acquisition process involves several stakeholders, including
State PWDs who prepare the DPRs on the basis of which the land
is acquired, state revenue officials who carry out the actual land
acquisition, Project zones of the Ministry which obtain approval of the
Minister (Competent authority) and Land Acquisition notifications.
Extensive stakeholder consultations were held over a period of
12 months, culminating in the final design of the utility, titled
‘Bhoomi Rashi’.
Training/orientation sessions were organized over a period of 6 months
in each state with officers who would actually be using the portal
for submitting draft notifications, and their suggestions were also
incorporated in the user interface and experience design of the portal.
Features at a glance
The broad features of the system are as follows:

• Bilingual application with Hindi and English

for easy usability
• Preparation of interface for adding project
basic details including LA sanction details.
• Preparation of interface for Land
Acquisition locations i.e. villages

PROJECT • Preparation of Interface for CALA details

SCOPE • Interface for generating LA notification
• Interface for Land Details
• Interface for generation of 3a, 3A & 3D
notification: organizational email IDS for
all those involved in the process flow to
ensure smooth e-office management
• Interface for Objections and processing
• Interface for compensation determination
and finalization
• Generation of web service for getting
payment status and beneficiary validation
from PFMS
• Interface for Land owners and affected parties
• Interface for reports generation

With regard to 711 districts and 6,55,297 villages

data has been incorporated and will be updated
from time to time by the admin:
• States: All states of India (E Gov Standards
Master Data)
MASTER • Districts: Under each state, details of
DATA districts of India (E Gov Standards
Master Data)
• Sub Districts/Tehsil/Taluka: Under each
district, details of sub districts (E Gov
Standards Master Data)
• Villages: Under each Sub District, details of
villages (E Gov Standards Master Data)
• All Regional offices of MoRTH, NHAI &
NHIDCL with login credentials for RO user
with DDO Code
• Login credentials for State PWDs officers

The system is completely secure with OTP

based security being provided at each level.

SECURITY
 • Data Entry in English - System would
convert it in Hindi and show in a parallel
text box
• For all master data, both Hindi & English
would be added
• During selection, English (Hindi) would
be shown
LANGUAGE
• On selection, selected value would be
shown in parallel LABEL field
• In reports, first data would be shown in
English and after page break, report in
Hindi would be shown

The portal has been designed to transmit

regular and real time notifications on:
• Generation of login credentials
• Submission of proposals
• Finalization of compensation by CALA,
ALERTS
RO, MoRTH/ NHAI/NHIDCL
• Payment

Bhoomi Rashi
Creating New Opportunities
Bhoomi Rashi was made operational on 1st April 2018. Up till August
2018, 850 LA proposals have been processed through the portal.
The portal has the potential to open new opportunities, and enhance
efficiency in the LA process. Earlier, physical processing of the cases
usually took weeks to even months. Now, the portal has reduced the
processing time to a few days, around 2 weeks for majority of the cases.
Bhoomi Rashi is now integrated with the Public Financial Management
System (PFMS) platform of the Ministry of Finance, for deposition
of compensation in the account of affected/interested person, on
real-time basis. The first set of actual payments in this regard have
been successfully made through PFMS for a NH Project in the State
of Rajasthan.