Jamshedpur, Jan. 9: A small building on the collectorate premises is buzzing with activity, as the work is on in full swing to digitalise the land records data.

As part of the pilot project, the land records in East Singhbhum is now in the last phase of being digitalised. The records of the nine blocks of the district were taken up by National Information Centre (NIC), Jamshedpur, to be converted to the digital format in March 2006.

“Currently, work is on to digitalise seven blocks. In about two months, we will cover all the nine blocks in the district,” said Sunil Verma, the district information officer of East Singhbhum.

“The entire records will be digitalised after we finish the work in two blocks of Chakulia and Baharagora,” the district information officer said.

National Information Centre has designed a software to store the data which was revised from time to time, Verma said.

As hand-written entries differ in formats from one village to another, a uniform format to accommodate all types of data was created. The task was also to restore many of the files, which are in bad shape, he added.

Funded by the central government, the project is being run under the leadership of the deputy commissioner of East Singhbhum. “This has helped us procure records from all the villages in the district,” he said.

The task has been assigned to Vaibhavi Enterprises, a company based in the steel city, for the data entry work.

“We decided to give it to a local company as they know the place better. Nearly, 30 trained people works in three shifts and additional 20 people are also taken for back up,” he said.

After data entries, a hard copy is given to officers in charge for double check. Then, the corrections made by them are entered. The process is continuing simultaneously with the first level of data entry.

The land survey is meant to be conducted once in every 30 years, which also establishes the ownership of plots.

After the successful completion of the project, the data would be stored offline in the main server of NIC, Jamshedpur. However, the long-term plan is to place this online on the State Wide Area Network which is being executed by Jharnet.

“Once we will have our content ready, we will make it online but that is still a long process,” said Verma.