“Our ancestors made this land fertile,” tribal farmer Bonda Lakshman Rao said, as we walked past the houses, church, and community hall built over the years by the residents of Andhra Pradesh’s Gadabapalam village. But Lakshman Rao no longer has legal rights over the land his family had cultivated for generations. In the last decade, several Dalit and tribal farmers like him have been stripped of their claim over the land, thanks to falsified records and an algorithmic shortcoming that has been overlooked in the state government’s push for digital efficiency.
At the heart of the problem is Meebhoomi (Webland), the state’s digitalised land records portal launched in 2015, that has been automated to show both cultivator and owner as the same person, erasing tenant farmers and others who have been cultivating the land for generations. According to the portal, Lakshman Rao’s land is now ‘owned’ and ‘cultivated’ by a non-resident Indian (NRI), who was named neither owner or cultivator in the physical records.
The basis for this change is a report, allegedly prepared without following due process, by the Village Revenue Officer (VRO). It stated that eight tribal farmers had entered into an agreement with the NRI to hand over 23.4 acres of land in exchange for money and that the farmers had objected to the mutation of the remaining 12.6 acres of land, where their houses and church stood.
The farmers alleged that this report is false. “Without conducting an inquiry, how can records now show the NRI as both pattadar (owner) and cultivator? Moreover, how can a person who doesn’t even stay in India be shown as the cultivator?" Lakshman Rao asked, baffled.
While the push for digitalising land records was meant to streamline governance and welfare delivery, it has only deepened marginalisations. The digitalisation efforts have ended up denying the land rights of many farmers belonging to tribal and Dalit communities and other backward classes. As flawed algorithms, unchecked data entry, and opaque technical systems overwrite decades-old land rights, farmers are also losing access to critical welfare schemes that rely on digital records.
The issue lies not with digitalisation itself, but its chaotic implementation, with even government officials unaware of how to navigate the software or fix technical glitches. Human errors, made invisible through automation, combined with lack of digital access and oversight, are disenfranchising the most vulnerable, often with no avenue for redress.
With digitalisation, land records are now easily accessible to resourceful individuals including local officials, but out of reach to tribal farmers, who continue to struggle for network connection and access to smartphones. In fact, Lakshman Rao is one of the few in his village who can read English and navigate digital records.
The state prides itself on being one of the first to digitise its land records, along with Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and became the first to complete 100% coverage under Bhu Aadhar, a unique land parcel identification number meant to track land ownership. Launching the Meebhoomi portal in 2015, Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu said, “People in the state need not go to revenue department offices for their land records and can [digitalise the records of] their ancestral lands without any hassles,” implying paperless transactions and decision making through digital records.
The records from the portal also serve as a gateway for welfare and relief measures, including the Union government-sponsored PM Kisan for landowning and the state-sponsored Rythu Bharosa that includes landless farmers. The state government uses the records to determine disaster relief and agricultural subsidies as well. Despite claims of 100% digitalisation of land records, the corrections are still going on, almost a decade later.
Located roughly three hours away from the port city of Visakhapatnam, Gadabapalam is a hamlet of around 400 people of Gadaba tribe, recognised as a particularly vulnerable tribal group (PVTG) in the Constitution. The village came up as a result of the labour of tribal farmers, who cultivated the nearby lands and built their homesteads and a church, as well as a temple of a tribal deity. Lakshmana Rao said that no one had threatened their way of life until about three years ago.
"Now, some NRIs and middlemen are claiming that this is their land,” he said.
“The tahsildar incorporated the NRI’s name as cultivator and owner for 23.40 acres and also showed that the NRI was a cultivator in 1 B and Adangal online on February 27,” he said. 1 B is a record that details land ownership and history while Adangals are land registers containing details of agricultural lands.
Usually, citizens have a different login access to the portal from authorities.
Authorities such as the tahsildar can change and approve changes to records. The residents of Gadbapalam don’t even have access to a computer and had to rely on physically filed right to information (RTI) applications to access records.
On March 17, villagers and activists submitted complaints to the tahsildar and local offices. PS Ajay, activist and member of All India Lawyers Association for Justice, said that the tahsildar, P Srinivas Rao, was aware of these contentions because in 2023, a survey showed Gadaba tribe members using the land. Ajay added that the poor are unable to address any changes that are made without due process of law because it is hard for them to track such changes in online records, made without consent or notification.
When the farmers received procedural documents through RTI, they noticed that all the signatories required by the law to approve such a change in ownership, including the Revenue Officer, had not signed off the report stating that they had sold the land to the NRI. Yet the request for ownership was approved by the VRO. “If all 36 acres are under cultivation [still], how did the VRO prepare such a report?” asked Ajay.
I wrote to the tahsildar to ask if he was aware of the contentions and asked why such changes were made to the Webland records. This story will be updated when I receive a response.
The law prescribes the following procedure to claim ownership over a piece of land:
In another instance, in Chatterjeepuram, a village in Rolugunda mandal named after a Bengali bureaucrat, farmers found themselves in a somewhat different problem. After downloading a copy of the details of their cultivation and land in April 2025, they found their names had disappeared. In 2016, they had done a similar exercise and had kept a printed copy with them.
“Had we not downloaded the records back in 2016, and kept a hard copy with us, we would have no way of knowing our names had been removed,” said Kedari Rajeswari, a 32-year-old tribal woman. Most recently, land brokers have reportedly been harassing them, asking them to vacate the land. The brokers came and destroyed their crops, Rajeswari alleged. All this happened even as they had already filed a case against the brokers for harassment in 2022.
In order to prove their rights, people took pictures of their families with GPS locations as part of their submissions.
Apart from unilateral removal of names from digital records, or changing ownership, another major problem highlighted by activists and residents in the regions is that of tenancy being not acknowledged.
The old land records, namely, pattadar passbooks (title deeds of land owners) and Adangals, recognise the rights of those who cultivate the land also, and not just owners. Old records documented this information in detail. Column 13 of the Adangal mentions farming practices and names of the cultivators, who may be tenants or landowners.
Ajay said that when the records were digitised, Column 13 was reportedly automated to show both cultivator and owner as the same person. “The revenue officials told me that when the name of the owner is updated, the name of the cultivator automatically gets updated as that of the owners,” he said.
The situation of tenant farmers in Andhra Pradesh, who are often locally referred to as “enjoyers,” has always been precarious. According to the state government, there are roughly 1.6 million tenant farmers, while the 2014 Radhakrishna Commission report put the figure at around 2.4 million. Of this, only 3% of landless tenants were receiving benefits under Rythu Bharosa, a 2022 study conducted by the Rythu Swarajya Vedika revealed.
The study, which surveyed nearly 4,000 tenant farmers across nine districts, found that over 90% of farmers had suffered severe crop losses in one of the three years prior to the survey but only 1% received any disaster compensation, pushing the cultivators into crippling debt, showing the link between improper digitalisation of records and relief measures related to disaster recovery.
“With the manipulation of Column 13 in online records in Webland, the tenant farmers and agricultural labourers are set to lose,” Ajay said.
Exclusion from digital land records has a cascading effect, as they are a foundational document to guarantee farmers’ rights. While different welfare schemes deployed various criteria for farmers to avail benefits, Rythu Bharosa and PM Kisan rely on digitised land records to identify beneficiaries. So far, the state has spent Rs 2 lakh crore (USD 24.24 billion) on welfare. In the budget allocated in 2025-26, the budget provision for Rythu Bharosa is Rs 6,300 crore (USD 709 million).
Digitalisation of records is done on the promise of greater efficiency in the delivery of welfare. The data goes on to inform the algorithms making decisions of inclusion and exclusion of beneficiaries from welfare schemes. The expectation is that these should perform in tandem with each other.
But, in reality, these systems don’t speak to each other.
In Ankapalle’s Kasimkota village, 12 Madiga farmers suddenly stopped getting compensation under PM Kisan and Rythu Bharosa. Each of the farmers, who traditionally work with leather, skin, etc, had been given half an acre of government wasteland in 1996 by the state. They had pattadar passbooks recording that they grow cashew, mango, teak, etc. on this land.
“Unless our names had been previously recorded in 1 B (digital land record), we wouldn’t have been eligible for the schemes in the first place. Suddenly last year, we found that all our names were removed from 1 B land records,” said Kolli Satyarao, a 55-year-old farmer. Despite being aware of their issue, local officials were unable to help them, even as they acknowledged that the farmers possessed all the records, as well as printouts and GPS locations of the lands they cultivated.
The auto mutation introduced to the scheme after it was renamed Annadata Sukhibhava, is even more dangerous according to activists, as the property is transferred to new ‘owners’ automatically after online registration, without any inquiry or verification.
I met the Revenue Division Officer for Ankapalle, Kumari Shaik Aaisha, who acknowledged that digitalisation should not be forced as digital literacy was lacking, but also emphasised its importance and urged that we look at the other side.
When I asked about the Madiga farmers’ loss of access to welfare schemes, she said, “We have a technical glitch.” However, the nature of the issue is not a simple technical failure. “Nobody understands the systems end to end. Project officers often approach technical persons, who address the problems in a piecemeal manner by applying small fixes as and when they arise,” said Chakradhar Buddha, a researcher at Libtech India.
A 2025 study undertaken by researchers from Libtech India, an organisation working on the intersection of public policy and technology, along with the University of Manchester and the University of Naples, showed that one of the major obstacles for farmers to receive payments under Rythu Bharosa is digitalised land records. As many as 40% are excluded because of problems of mutation of land records, the study found.
“Land records are often maintained at the household level or at inter-generational level, both implying that there is a big possibility of mismatch between the name updated on the scheme and the Aadhaar details required [to avail the scheme], as reflected in two different algorithms,” highlight Buddha. Simply put, a small mismatch between even a single character in two different records can lead the algorithm to reject beneficiaries.
For instance, a farmer in Chintanpalli didn’t receive benefits because the land records of his village were swapped online with the land records of another village. As a result, the farmer could not link his land records with his Aadhaar and lost nearly Rs 40,000 (USD 500). He visited local offices several times, without any success.
The follow up is tedious as Aaisha elaborated — after checking their online status, a farmer first needs to approach the tahsildar, who will then report to his superior, which will then reach the District Collector, who will raise the issue with a technical person. “It takes some time, even up to three months, which may create panic,” she said. Asked about the removal of some columns, she said that those were not useful to the government and hence dropped, since so much detail wasn’t required.
The state government then issued cultivator cards to tenant farmers, which are valid only for 11 months, once again trying to resolve through paper a problem created by digitalisation of records. “With the cards, the government tried to address the insecurity of landowners, while the handwritten Adangal was more about rights to the tiller,” Buddha said, highlighting the difference in the philosophy that dictates the design of systems.
A new addition to the troubles of the people is the introduction of eKYC, a one time password-based verification method that relies on biometric verification via Aadhaar. This means that simply accessing one’s records, a bare minimum possible earlier, is incumbent on an active phone number.
“In rural and tribal areas, many times people don’t have mobile phones, or don’t have a valid recharge,” Buddha said, adding that earlier, mobile operators would not deactivate numbers as quickly as they do now. According to the government, 4,543 PVTG habitations are not covered by mobile services, while smartphone access remains lower in rural and tribal communities.
To understand the reasons for rejection of beneficiaries from these schemes, Libtech India studied the PM Kisan scheme and analysed data available at the time of more than 5.6 million registered farmers, for the eight installments from December 2018 to July 2021, augmenting it with field studies in five districts.
More than 4.17 lakh farmers registered in the state had not received a single payment from PM Kisan till then, they said. Nearly two-thirds of the missing amount was due to bank rejections and state action. Aadhaar-related issues contributed to 8.4% of the missing amount. The study showed the frailty of systems relying on a host of parameters to provide welfare, and the implications when officials themselves aren’t well equipped to handle errors.
More recently, publicly available data on PM Kisan has become more obscure with the official website and several Lok Sabha responses only showing total funds disbursed or total number of people benefited.
I reached out to the state’s chief commissioner of land administration, G Jayalakshmi, about claims of NRIs and others on lands cultivated by tribal and Dalit farmers, as well as on the exclusion of Madiga farmers from welfare schemes. This story will be updated if a response is received.
The National Informatics Centre (NIC) handles all technical aspects of land digitalisation and its simultaneous connection with other schemes. The NIC outsources much of its work to private firms or smaller software consultancies, the details of which are not available to the public.
Four engineers who recently resigned from NIC told me on the condition of anonymity that the agency often offers paltry sums, even for the most important software development, and hence does not get highly skilled software developers who can develop systems to reflect ground realities. Most of the time, the data, algorithms, and technical know-how is shrouded in secrecy, even from the government’s own officials.
In such a situation, villagers and tribals are in the dark when their records are changed. “Even though there will be digital footprints of every change [made by officials], they are not visible to common people. Only the tahsildar can see such details through the logins available to them,” said Buddha.
I wrote to the central NIC and Andhra state NIC on August 27. The state NIC in their response said that the Webland team was “providing only land details through application programming interface (API) to the Agriculture Department and real time gross settlement (RTGS) for processing of all DBT (direct benefit transfer) related schemes. The NIC team handling Webland is not involved in any process of DBT schemes.” When I followed up by asking whether the NIC outsources its code development work to private entities, I received a similar response stating that NIC is responsible only for software development and technical activity.
“It is true that there is an increasing centralisation of systems, as the Aadhaar experience showed us. This has reconfigured the work of local level officials, many of who are not familiar with the technicality,” said Divij Joshi, a researcher at University College of London, on the pattern of local officials’ lack of technical control over the applications.
“Earlier, people could go back to officials starting a paper trail; with these systems, nobody knows who is in charge,” Joshi said.
In Ankapalle, on June 1, tribal and Dalit farmers, women, and children walked from various villages to the district headquarters to demand their rights, including transparency in their online records. They said that while digitised systems can be used, it was not time yet to fully automate systems as they do not reflect ground realities. Instead, they said that they want paper trails and records to continue to be in use.
As the Gadabapalam experience showed, residents had to rely on RTIs to find that due process had not been followed to make changes to their digital records. Had the residents of Chatterjeepuram not kept a physical copy of the records they downloaded in 2016, they may have found it much harder to prove their claims over the land.
Scholars like Silvia Maseiro and Soumyo Das have talked about design-related data justice, in which the design of social protection aligns with the needs of end users. Some organisations working at the intersection of technology and the social sector, such as Libtech, have proposed a process audit, where technologists are required to constantly check the ground situation, undertake helpful requirements analyses, and test whether the system works, before purposing it for thousands.
“In the journey of software design, possibly the most important step is how citizens interact with data entry operators. We observe these interactions, and a lot depends on the perception of the operators. For instance, in one incident of misdirection of payments, the operators initially thought that having more data in the form meant the beneficiary was more valid or legitimate,” Buddha said. Process audits can help rectify that, not only for citizens, but also for data entry operators and technical persons. This can be helpful for farmers in Kasimkota and Gadabapalam, who in Ajay’s words, can lose everything simply “by the stroke of a mouseclick”.
This article is produced under the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network fellowship.
Sushmita is a freelance journalist, artist, and former engineer. She writes on climate, governance, and indigenous people’s rights. Her reporting has won international and national awards such as Covering Climate Now 2024 and Red Ink Award for Excellence in Indian journalism.