The Union government has launched the third phase of the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (DILRMP), proposing a unified digital system for land records, maps, registrations and related legal information across rural and urban areas. The guidelines for DILRMP 3.0 were released on Thursday, with an allocation of Rs 565.5 crore for implementation between 2026 and 2031.
The programme will introduce a 14-digit unique identification number for land parcels under what the government has described as Universal Bhu-Aadhaar. The identification system is intended to provide a clear reference for individual properties and help reduce fraud by linking land parcels with digital records and maps.
Union Rural Development Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said the initiative would move beyond the digitisation of individual records towards a unified land-management system. According to the announcement reported by Aaj Tak Business, the system is also expected to make it easier for farmers to obtain institutional loans and reduce the need for repeated visits to government offices.
A central component of DILRMP 3.0 will be a GIS-enabled land stack. This framework will bring together georeferenced cadastral maps, records of rights, property-registration details and information on related court cases through a GIS-based digital interface. States will be able to develop their own land stacks by integrating datasets and systems through application programming interfaces, with state-level platforms forming the basis of a proposed national land stack.
The programme also includes changes to property-registration services. Seventy-five high-footfall sub-registrar offices will be modernised as service centres on the lines of passport service centres. The planned upgrades are intended to provide more digital facilities and a more structured interface for citizens using registration services.
DILRMP 3.0 will also provide for the systematic scanning and preservation of older land and property-registration records. The digitisation of legacy documents is aimed at protecting inheritance-related rights and helping address disputes involving ancestral property. A registration repository will store registered documents along with information on property-related liabilities or loans, enabling ownership checks, review of transaction histories and other property due diligence.
The government is further planning to modernise the Revenue Courts Case Management System and connect it directly with land records. The paperless revenue-court system is intended to improve the management of pending cases and speed up the disposal of matters related to mutation, the process through which changes in ownership or rights are recorded.
For urban areas, the programme will accelerate the NAKSHA pilot project to create more accurate GIS-enabled land records. The initiative also provides for the issuance of Urban Property Cards, or UrPro Cards, as part of the proposed urban land-mapping framework.
The announcement does not establish a single nationwide implementation date for each component. The programme guidelines cover the 2026–31 period, while the pace of integration, record scanning, urban mapping and service-centre modernisation will depend on implementation by the states and participating authorities.
