For the past year, the family of Laxmi Yadav, hailing from Uttar Pradesh and belonging to the Scheduled Caste, has been navigating the bureaucratic hurdles at the Basti District collectorate. Their aim? To secure permission to sell their 1.5 bigha land to an individual from a different caste.

It is to be noted that Section 98(1) of the Uttar Pradesh Revenue Code 2006 does not allow a landowner belonging to a Scheduled Caste to sell/gift/mortgage/lease any land to a person not belonging to a Scheduled Caste, except with the previous permission of the collector.

Narrating the woes that were brought to the family because of the year-long-pending case, Laxmi tells The Better India, “We had married off our daughter and have also been bearing medical expenses of Rs 20,000 a month. To manage these expenses, we took loans worth Rs 5 lakh. To repay the loan amounts, we needed to sell the land. So we brought our case to the collectorate’s notice but nobody listened to us.”

This January, her case was resolved. “Thanks to the present DM sahab, our case got finalised in the second hearing, and we got the permission to sell our land. There were people in our village whose cases were pending for as long as five years; their cases were resolved too,” adds the farmer, who lives in Basti district’s Palha village.

In a remarkable initiative, the District Magistrate Vamsi Andra spearheaded the resolution of about 50,000 pending cases in nearly four months. In a conversation with The Better India, the IAS officer sheds light on how he achieved this feat.

No more justice denied

Hailing from Ongole village of Andhra Pradesh, Vamsi is a computer science engineer by education. After his graduation in 2006, he went on to pursue a career as an IAS officer. In 2011, he was selected for Indian administrative services and later worked in several districts — including Pilibhit, Shahjahanpur, Mathura, Prayagraj, Moradabad, Kushinagar, and Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh.

Last September, the 38-year-old was appointed as the District Collector of the Basti district – where the local people are largely employed in agriculture and agro-based small-scale industries.

The IAS officer points out, “In an agrarian structure, people’s major economic activities are tied to farming where the field issues related to land paymaish (measurements), medh (farm boundaries), nali (drainage), kharanja (pavement), and batwara (fund allocation), are very prominent. These are petty little disputes where people waste their time unnecessarily.”

“When two people fight, there will be a dispute, and if you linger on petty things, the dispute will last forever. Such circumstances also promote animosities amongst them, at times leading to criminal activities. So, justice should be delivered on time as justice delayed is justice denied. So, that is a mantra that we worked on,” he adds.

Cracking the whip

Of the long list of pending cases, Vamsi found out that most were related to mutation, correction of records, title declaration, measurement and demarcation of the land, renewal of the encroachment upon Government lands, consolidation, the revenue collections in terms of stamp duty, Gangster Act, the validation of the pattas (land deeds), and correction of the maps.

To work towards a dispute resolution mechanism, the IAS officer roped in all the officers — including additional collectors, sub-collectors, tehsildars, nayab tehsildars, consolidation officers, data entry operators, lekhpals, councils, and bar associations — to resolve the long-pending cases.

Collectively, the team started opening all the cases.

“We took out the summary of long-standing cases and formed a systematic, daily status monitoring report of each and every case. We finalised the number of new filings and the number of old filings between one year and five years. People were given a daily target. If the council was not present, the presiding officers were authorised to go to the field and dispose of issues based on the written statements given by the plaintiff as well as the complainant,” says the IAS officer.

Vamsi also identified and dropped proceedings of cases where people were wrongly included in heinous crimes. “Apart from that, there were so many people who would not even turn up to the hearings. For example, a person had been given 33 notices, and yet, they didn’t turn up. So we have set a bar post which, such cases will be nullified. So that’s how this entire activity was carried out,” he shares.

This was followed by the monitoring of daily status reports by the presiding officers and a review of the delays by the management. “Their entire basic work has been monitored very strictly. There is no dearth of officers and field authorities, and all of them are asked for their daily status reports. Even they have to file the verification reports to get the case to a logical conclusion,” he adds.

Together, the collectorate disposed of 49,823 cases in four months between October 2023 and January 2024. The IAS officer informs that the district still has a backlog of 19,900 cases. “Of these, 5,700 cases are about one year old, 1,150 about three years, and 1,650 are above five years old. A person should not have to visit the court for as long as five years. Our priority is to resolve these cases as soon as possible,” he says.

Talking about the impact of the work, Vamsi says, “More people are coming to us for the dispute resolution. While old cases are being resolved, we have filed 17,700 new cases in the last four months. It is another symbol of trust that people are coming to the court with the hope that now their issues will be discussed very quickly. It makes the citizens happy from a broader perspective.”

Vamsi credits his entire team for this feat. “It was the collective effort. I want to thank all the members from data entry operators to additional collectors. Currently, the Government is working at a very fast pace. This has also helped us achieve this feat. Besides, I don’t want myself to be predicted as someone superlative. It is a standard routine affair for any district collector,” says the officer.

(Edited by Pranita Bhat; All images: IAS Vamsi Andra)