1 ABSTRACT India is a developing country and it requires fast space quality infrastructure development, which is the need of current times. For any development, land is required and the land belongs to the people. Government is acquiring land for public purpose for the development of National Highways through National Highway Act of India 1956. Acquisition of land for public purpose displaces people, forcing them to give up their home, assets and means of livelihood. The Government of India

more »

... ) recognizes the need to minimize large scale displacement to the extent possible and, where displacement is inevitable, the need to handle with utmost care and forethought issues relating to Resettlement and Rehabilitation (R&R) of Project Affected Families (PAF) and formulate R&R Policies (NRRP 2007). But the ground reality differs from R&R policy. For assessment of land details are recorded in a system which is more than two hundred years old. This conventional system is not fulfilling the changing demands of time and ground truthing of space. The upcoming technologies such as Geographical Information System (GIS), data warehousing and web based information dissemination shall be very much helpful in land records management for decision making, strategy planning and predictive modeling. The use of these technological leverages can make land records management efficiently. Since time immemorial, it has been a constant endeavour of human being to pursue various aspects of life with ease. In the present era of high-end computing, this endeavour of simplifying things is well achieved by an effective tool like GIS, when applied to, as complicated a process as land acquisition. Unlike the conventional procedure of simultaneous handling of various maps such as village cloth maps, engineering drawings and Layout plans etc., which are of different scale, GIS helps to prepare the maps and peruse the maps of multiple types at the same instance through registration of geographic coordinates. The concept of layer mechanism and subsequent superimposition one above the other is used so as to store both non-spatial and spatial data in different thematic layers. GIS technique has determined a fair and accurate location of linear alignment of proposed road corridor from current highways and to manage cadastral information which has to be obtained by satellite imagery, land records, Physical survey and land parcel creation more proactively by Overlay Analysis in accordance with name of the village and plot number basis. For the planners this entire process is made available at fingertips at the Personal Computers (PCs) without unfolding the age old cloth maps. The major hindrance in acquisition is calculation of proposed required area from a specific parcel or environmental sensitive areas, defense lands, alteration of topography etc. Through this approach an effort is made to analyse the various causes of mismatch between the map area and the old-recorded area and also the present manual system of superimposition of maps. In this context this paper describes a proposed automated process of land acquisition through Geographic Information System there by reducing the malpractice of resettlement and rehabilitation issues particularly in road development project in India.