Chief minister Nitish Kumar (left) and deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi at the cabinet meeting in Patna on Sunday. Picture by Deepak Kumar

Patna, Nov. 6: The Bihar government has decided to update all land records in the next three years.

To realise this goal, an extensive land survey would be conducted across the state. Approval to this proposal was given in the third meeting of agriculture cabinet held today.

According to the proposal, latest techniques like spatial imagery technique and aerial survey would be conducted to ensure timely completion of land survey in stipulated time of three years.

“Use of traditional techniques take quite some time hence it has been decided to use latest techniques,” agriculture department principal secretary Ashok Kumar Sinha told reporters in the post-agriculture cabinet press meet. He added that after completion of the survey, the next five years would be used for doing land consolidation work.

At present, most of the districts do not have updated land records. While records of 16 out of 38 districts are 125 years old, the remaining ones are more than 50 years old.

The non-availability of updated records also delay the process of litigations related to claims over land. Moreover, land-related law and order problems are very common across the state.

The proposal of fresh land survey was part of the joint presentation, in which main points of the reports of 11 committees were put up before the cabinet.

Total 14 committees were set up in the first meeting of the agriculture cabinet held on April 26 this year. Reports of three committees were put for approval in the second cabinet meet held on August 12 and those of the remaining ones were put for approval in today’s cabinet meet.

The state government came up with the idea of holding separate cabinet meeting for agriculture sector with a view to have in place a comprehensive approach for the development of agriculture sector with allied departments playing the supportive role for achieving the desired results. A total of 17 government departments have been made part of the agriculture cabinet.

The committee on irrigation sector has charted out a roadmap to provide irrigation facility to 44.9 lakh hectares of land that would be used for Garma crops (March-May). The committee talks about sinking 12.14 lakh borewells in the next 10 years. The report also talks about draining out water from 5.11 lakh hectare of waterlogged areas so that the waterlogged land could be made arable.

While planning big on the borewell front, the topic of giving power supply to these pumps also came up for discussion and the energy department in its presentation said it would energise 90 per cent of these pumps using conventional source of energy and to the rest through non-conventional sources of energy.

Replying to a query that from where would this power come from in a state which is facing acute electricity shortage, Sinha said that details of this would be given in the agriculture roadmap which the state government would come out with in near future.

Today’s agriculture cabinet meet also gave approval to a proposal which talked about increasing the green cover of the state from the present 7 per cent of the total geographical area to 15 per cent in the next 10 years.

“As part of this drive, bamboo plantation would be done along 10,000km of embankment,” said the principal secretary.

On food processing, the agriculture cabinet gave in principal approval to a plan that talks of setting up three mega-food parks under the public-private partnership mode and to bring down the percentage of fruits and vegetables which perish after production.

At present, this percentage stands at around 40 per cent of the total produce of the fruits and vegetables and the proposal talks of bringing it down to 5 per cent in the next 10 years.

A proposal of producing 100MW of power through rice husk in the next 10 years was also approved.