SHERWYN F F CORREIA
First a drone over the rooftops. Now a surveyor at the gate. In Panaji, Margao and Cuncolim, neither is a curiosity – together they are a legal event. A new record is being drawn on every parcel beneath them, and every landowner has 30 days to prove, in effect, that what he has held is still his. That is the quiet demand of NAKSHA.
The instrument is NAKSHA – the National Geospatial Knowledge-based Land Survey of Urban Habitations – a one-year Central Government pilot project under the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme, launched in February 2025. Goa gave it statutory form through the Goa (National Geospatial Knowledge Based) Land Survey of Urban Habitations Rules, 2025, framed under Section 199 of the Goa Land Revenue Code, 1968 (LRC), and in force from January 1, 2026. All three municipal areas and their peri-urban belts are now mapped.
Issues with legal character
Understand its legal character. This is not the familiar “city survey” of the 1970s that gave us our PT Sheets and Chalta numbers; it is a revenue survey directed under Section 56 LRC. The Inspector of Surveys and Land Records (ISLR), sitting as Inquiry Officer, must determine “right, title and interest” and prepare a new record, the Urban Property Card (UrPro). A draft is published, objections invited within thirty days, and an appeal lies to the Superintendent (SSLR) within six months.
A property card carries only a rebuttable presumption of correctness; it is not a title deed. It records, it does not confer. A map cannot strip away a title that stands on a registered deed.
The ledger also has a credit side. The Rules give the landowner something solid, a published draft open to objection for thirty days, an acknowledged grievance, an appeal, and a civil suit preserved by Section 14. In short, an opportunity to correct a boundary or contest a wrong entry before it hardens. And the UrPro promises a fresh, drone-accurate, geo-referenced card with a unique parcel ID, the first update since the 1970s, precisely what pre-empts tomorrow’s boundary dispute.
Issues with implementation
The harder worry, though, is implementation. In Margao alone, the holdings run into thousands (by some counts around 24,000), yet owners must appear within a 30-day window, July 16 to August 14. That is a bitter demand for a senior citizen, someone with a day job, or a Goan working abroad. Can one ISLR’s office verify the title at that scale?
Is an ISLR, trained in land measurement rather than the law of title, the right forum to weigh succession, easement, tenancy, litigious properties and competing ownership, questions long belonging to the civil courts?
Issues of notice
There is also the issue of notice. Is a lone press notice a fair substitute for individual intimation to each recorded owner, more so when an “unclaimed” parcel can be referred to the Collector for escheat under the Goa Escheats, Forfeiture and Bona Vacantia Act?
The LRC may deem public notice sufficient, but for an exercise touching title and tenure of this scale, and a community as scattered as ours, individual notice to owners on record is what fairness commends. And what, in all this, stops a fraudulent claim on an absent owner's plot from hardening quietly into a digitally signed record?
Better tools for verification
There is, too, an easy remedy left untaken. NAKSHA is a web-GIS exercise, and the Rules speak of publication on the Directorate’s website. Why, then, are the drone maps and draft entries not placed, parcel by parcel, on a dedicated portal, so that a landowner sitting in Margao or London can see what is recorded against his property and track each objection or correction as made? Such transparency would thin the queues and let the exercise be watched rather than endured.
Diligence, then, is not optional. As things stand, a landowner will have to show up at the ISLR’s office or depute an authorised representative within the window. Carry originals: registered conveyances, inventory proceeding allotments, existing Form B/D’s. Verify boundaries, flag encroachments and easements, inspect the draft UrPro, and object in time. Do not wait for correction after the record hardens.
NAKSHA as template?
Does NAKSHA supersede the old city survey? Not yet. It works within the LRC, a fresh revenue survey under Section 56, not a repeal of PT Sheets. The DSLR says pilot data stays isolated until a Statewide exercise. The new card’s standing, where it collides with existing Form B/D entries, remains unclarified.
The pilot project is also a template. What is trialled in the three towns today will likely reach every town and village tomorrow, giving every landowner in Goa a reason to watch.
The drone sees rooftops; it cannot read your title. Nor can it, by itself, ensure you were heard. Both are for the landowner to secure. In matters of land, the record protects the owner who shows up. The one who stays away may pay for the silence.
(The writer is a lawyer practising before the High Court, District Courts and quasi-judicial tribunals in Goa)
