The Delhi High Court has taken suo motu cognisance of the challenges faced by residents of Delhi’s urbanised villages when it comes to the mutation (entry in revenue records) of their land.

This development comes after Supreme Court judge, Justice Sanjiv Khanna, along with Acting Chief Justice, Manmohan, visited Jaunti village in North-West Delhi pursuant to an event organised by Delhi State Legal Services Authority (DSLSA) on August 10 focused upon addressing the multifaceted challenges faced by the remote and underdeveloped areas of Delhi.

During interaction with the judges, the villagers voiced concerns regarding the difficulties faced by them pertaining to mutation in the land records.

They said they wished to get their immovable properties inherited from ancestors mutated in their names in the land records as per law, but mutation applications with all the necessary documents attached gather dust endlessly in the concerned departments despite persistent efforts over the years, the aggrieved villagers complained.

Mutation is the process of changing the title of a property in the records of the local authorities.

A Division Bench of Acting Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela noted that the problem regarding the mutation of properties in Delhi’s urbanised villages has persisted for the last two decades after these villages turned into urban settlements.

The bench has issued notices to the Land & Development Officer (L&DO) of the Ministry of Urban Development, Commissioner, Municipal Corporation of Delhi, Vice Chairman, Delhi Development Authority, Secretary (Revenue)/Development Commissioner, Delhi Government and Member-Secretary, Delhi State Legal Services Authority.

As against today’s complex mutation process, a simple method known as Lal Dora was used in the past to demarcate the jurisdiction of a village on lands where populations resided.

When the population increased and villagers got a homestead plot against their scattered agricultural land holdings under the ‘chakbandi’ scheme, the concept of extended Lal Dora was introduced.

As a result, thousands of people living in the Capital city’s villages, both rural and urban, do not have clear ownership rights to their properties since the ‘abadi’ area (the part of a village with residential structures when the rest is farmland) was earlier considered as one khasra, or plot of land.

To add to their woes, despite the division of land among the members of extended families, the names of the next generation inheritors were never entered in the revenue records.

In its order, the bench said “The absence of a documentation mechanism by land-owning agencies post-urbanisation disproportionately affects the urban poor.

“Lack of formal property rights evidence prevents access to credit facility for construction and renovation, and benefits from Government schemes or participation in land pooling policy of the Delhi Government. Such a legal vacuum disabling the villagers when it comes to managing their immovable properties prima facie violates their fundamental right under Article 21 and constitutional right under Article 300A of the Constitution of India, and, accordingly, needs to be addressed at the earliest by the concerned departments/government agencies,” the court said.

The court observed there is complete absence of any law/policy/guidelines/rules whereby rights of mutation can be availed by the residents of such villages before the appropriate forum i.e. the concerned subsequent land-holding agency whether it be the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the Land and Development Office (L&DO) of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India or the Delhi Development Authority in case of such lands being notified as ‘development areas’ under the provisions of Section 12 of the Delhi Development Authority Act, 1957.

The Bench noted that Section 507(a) of the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act read with Section 150(3) of the Delhi Land Reforms Act, 1954 states that after a notification under these provisions, a Gram Sabha stands dissolved and the land gets vested in the Central Government. The court noted that as per a notification issued in 2019, the Delhi Government’s Revenue Department ceased to maintain land records pertaining to urbanised areas as the concerned village or villages ceased to be a part of ‘rural areas’ under the DMC Act and were included in the ‘urban areas’.