On November 19, 2020 Union Minister for Defence, Rajnath Singh virtually launched a Portal “Land Management System (LMS)”, it is the First LMS portal developed by the Department of Defence in association with Director General Defence Estates (DGDE) and Armed forces.
i.The portal will help in improving the overall management of defence land.
ii.The portal will digitize all the requests of Defence Land Management received by the Defence Department in the future.
Objective:
The portal will bring greater speed, transparency and efficiency into the Defence Department, reducing encroachments on Defence lands and to help in improving the decision making process.
Key Points:
i.The portal is integrated with GIS (Geographic Information System) tools, Technical support to the Portal was provided by BISAG (Bhaskaracharya Institute for Space Applications and Geoinformatics, Gujarat) to improve the decision making process.
ii.All the Data captured since 2016 will be available in the portal. A process is in progress for integrating archival data into the portal.
iii.The software apart from capturing textual details of proposals relating to land management will integrate the textual details with Raksha Bhoomi Software (includes satellite imagery of the area and other amenities).
Background:
The main reason behind the launch of the Land Management System (LMS) is to reduce encroachment on Defence Lands.
i.According to data shared by the Defence Department in Parliament, three states Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra reported high amounts of encroachments on defence land from 2017 to 2020.
ii.It shows that around 56.48 acres of defence lands have been encroached in the last three years.
iv.The removal of encroachments on defence land are carried out under the provisions of Public Premises (Eviction of Unauthorised Occupants) Act, 1971, as well as under the Cantonment Act, 2006.
v.The Defence lands are managed by the DGDE.
Recent Related News:
i.On September 11, 2020 Government of India constituted an Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) under the chairmanship of Union Minister for Defence, Rajnath Singh to oversee the Corporatisation of Ordnance Factory Board (OFB).
About Ministry of Defence:
Union Minister – Rajnath Singh
Minister of State – Shripad Yesso Naik
