Scaling urban land governance in India: the NAKSHA Programme as a platform for governance innovation for sustainable cities

Abstract

Urban land governance in India is historically constrained by the lack of comprehensive, legally recognised, and spatially accurate land and property records. This structural deficit significantly impedes municipal finance, precision urban planning, disaster management, infrastructure development, and macroeconomic stability. To address this systemic gap, the Department of Land Resources, Government of India, initiated the NAKSHA (NAtional geospatial Knowledge-based land Survey of urban HAbitations) pilot programme in February 2025. The one-year pilot covers 150 Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) across 25 states and 3 Union Territories and represents a systematic, technology-driven intervention for modernising urban land administration. This study employs a comparative policy, institutional, and technological analysis of the NAKSHA implementation framework. NAKSHA is examined alongside analogous land administration reforms in Rwanda, Kenya, Turkey, and Colombia, as well as India’s rural SVAMITVA (Survey of Villages and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas) scheme. The study evaluates the programme across technological, institutional, legal, administrative, and equity dimensions. Particular attention is given to its integration of UAV-based aerial photogrammetry with 5-cm ground sampling distance, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Rover-based field surveys supported by the Continuously Operating Reference Station (CORS) network, and an end-to-end cloud-based Web-GIS platform for generating legally verifiable Urban Property Ownership Records (UrPro) and property cards. The analysis finds that NAKSHA represents a technically sophisticated framework with substantial potential to improve the spatial accuracy, accessibility, transparency, and legal verifiability of urban property records. However, scaling the initiative from 150 pilot ULBs to approximately 4,912 ULBs presents major structural challenges. These include the absence of a comprehensive statutory framework for urban land records, fragmented institutional responsibilities across multiple government agencies, significant technical and administrative capacity deficits within ULBs, complex tenure arrangements and documentation gaps in informal settlements, inadequate mechanisms for continuous data maintenance and updating, and challenges concerning political acceptance, citizen participation, and equitable inclusion. The findings demonstrate that the long-term success of NAKSHA will depend less on geospatial technology alone and more on the development of enabling legal, institutional, administrative, and social frameworks. Comparative international evidence indicates that successful land administration reforms require statutory recognition of digital records, institutional interoperability, sustained technical and financial capacity, mechanisms for continuous cadastral updating, tenure-sensitive approaches, and meaningful community engagement. Accordingly, the study proposes an evidence-based policy roadmap for the national scaling of NAKSHA, centred on statutory reform, inter-agency coordination, ULB capacity building, inclusive treatment of informal and vulnerable settlements, permanent data governance and maintenance mechanisms, quality assurance, and participatory implementation. The study concludes that NAKSHA has the potential to become a transformative foundation for urban land governance in India, provided technological modernisation is accompanied by durable institutional and legal reforms that promote inclusive, sustainable, and climate-resilient urban development.