In a bid to digitise all land records in the national capital, the southwest district has started digitisation of land records in its area and has made them available online in the public domain. This will be a great boon to the citizens in terms of authenticity as the legal status of ownership of a property can be checked by any prospective buyer from the website, thus safeguarding them against unscrupulous elements. Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has decided to replicate this project in all the districts of Delhi within next six months, ensuring that Delhi’s entire land record is digitised. The move will also make it possible for the citizens to directly download digitally signed copies of their record-of-rights. Giving details of the project, district magistrate (southwest) Ankur Garg said the initiative will allow the citizens to have round-the-clock access to his/her record of rights and bring in enhanced transparency levels. “Multiple copies can also be printed directly. Further, if any agency wishes to verify the authenticity of the records, they can directly see it from the website rather than writing manually to the office which often results in wastage of three to four weeks,” he said. Besides, this will reduce the workload on the department staff itself, as citizens no longer have to come to patwari office for getting their record of rights and the patwari doesn’t have to search and prepare copies of those records. “Further, over a period of time, citizen feedback will help improve the accuracy of the database further thereby leading to a neat and clean regime of property records in the district,” Mr Garg said. Online mutation module has also been developed and all mutations are processed through this module exclusively so that the database remains updated at all times. As the records have been computerised in Devnagri script, the facility of a virtual Hindi keyboard has also been provided on the website to enable easy search based on name. He appealed to the citizens to visit the website and give their suggestions and feedback.