Chennai, Aug 16 (IANS): The Tamil Nadu revenue department has started a massive exercise to make corrections in the mistakes in the names and details of people in digital land records.

Several land owners, even those who have modest land holding, had complained to the department that they have to wait for long hours and even several days to get the mistakes corrected in the digital records and were facing massive problems due to this.

Murugan. M.R who had to sell his ancestral 2.5 cents had to run from pillar to post as there were some minor errors in the spelling of his late father's name. Murugan told IANS, "It was a harrowing experience. Even after I produced the death certificate of my father with the correct initials, the officials did not allow and I suspect that they wanted a bribe, but I was not willing to give it. This exercise on correcting errors is good for the general public and will relieve of the trauma they have to face when approaching a tehsildar or village office."

The records were digitalized in Tamil Nadu a few years ago and this included corrections in almost all the records barring a few creating problems to the hapless landowners.

A senior revenue department official told IANS, "The number of transactions, I mean sale of land is more in cities and hence there will be huge time log required for correcting the digital land records. For instance, Chennai has a huge backlog and time frame will be more but in rural and remote villages, as there are negligible land transactions, things would be easy."

The official said that the department would check each digitized record against the copy of the document and correct the entries thus giving less room for errors in future also.

The Revenue department has also communicated to the state registration department to provide details of all buyers including their contact numbers for sending SMS for the name transfer of pattas.

The department has also started automatic name transfer of land records or 'pattas' after-sale deeds were executed in the registration department. It may be recalled that the automatic name transfer commenced in February 2021 by linking the records with the Department of Registration.