Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel on Friday said that through its various citizen-centric governance initiatives, Gujarat has become a role model of development and growth engine for the country. The CM made the statement while delivering a speech at Mahatma Gandhi Convention Centre in Gandhinagar after inaugurating a national conference on Land Administration and Disaster Management. The two-day National Conference has been jointly organised by the state government and the Central government’s Ministry of Rural Development and Land Resources along with the Gujarat State Disaster Management Authority. Talking about various initiatives of the Gujarat government in the direction of people-centric governance, CM Patel said, “All these initiatives of Gujarat bring to light the fact that it is indeed through citizen-centric governance that Gujarat has become the country's role model of development and growth engine today.” Giving credit for these initiatives to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had served as the Gujarat CM in the past, CM Patel said, “Gujarat is lucky to have the benefit of having visionary leadership of PM Modi continuously for the past 24 years. When he was the CM of Gujarat, Narendrabhai had got total digitisation of land records started in the state. When farmers of other states used to make rounds of government offices for their own land records, Modi had digitised land records of farmers through the e-Dhara project.” Patel said, “Aiming transparency and credible governance, iORA (Integrated Online Revenue Applications) is one initiative of Modi in which more than 35 land records related services have been made end-to-end online through this portal.” In this context, the CM also spoke about other initiatives like the Garvi 2.0 platform to provide land-related documents to citizens at their doorstep. He said that technology developed by Indian institutes like BISAG, ISRO and NIC are being used for satellite mapping of land parcels. Touching upon the subject of disaster management, the CM said, “In the past few years, we have effectively implemented a zero-casualty approach to natural calamities. However, the increasing frequency of natural calamities in recent years has made it necessary to adopt an integrated approach to land administration and disaster management.” The conference has been organised to focus on the vision to achieve the objectives of the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Program (DILRMP). It is based on various themes like modernising revenue laws for citizen-centric governance, upgradation of land record and registration systems, creation and updating urban land records, revenue court cases, best practices and experience-sharing in disaster management, and human resource planning for modern land administration.
