Landesa

Helping Communities Update Land Records

Project Location
Telangana, India

Landesa

Their Mission

Landesa is a non-profit organization that partners with governments and local organizations to secure legal land rights for the world’s poorest families.

Project with Cadasta

In an effort to update the land records of Telangana, India, Landesa developed and tested a low-cost, community-led process for collecting information on land documentation. The process relied on trained community members and paralegals to gather and analyze information village-by-village through household surveys, land records analysis, and field verification. Their initial approach involved collecting and analyzing the data using traditional surveys conducted with pencil and paper. Gathering this information generally took about three hours per land parcel.

Looking to improve the project’s efficiency and effectiveness, Landesa partnered with Cadasta. Cadasta developed a tailor-made digital questionnaire and trained Landesa staff and community paralegals in India to collect land and resource rights data using GPS-enabled mobile phones and tablets. Cadasta’s training and tools brought the time needed to record data from a single parcel from three hours to less than forty minutes and reduced the rate of transcription errors.

More Information

Profile of Partnership: Landesa

In the Indian state of Telangana, rural land records have largely not been updated since the 1940s. Recent field studies indicate that most of these records are no longer accurate. As a result, a vast majority of smallholder farmers have unclear and insecure rights to the land they rely on.

Learn more about how Cadasta partnered with Landesa to update the region’s land records.

Read More

Cadasta Review

With Cadasta’s technology, we can record the data faster, reduce errors, and in the end, produce land records that are even easier to share with government.

Jolyne Sanjak
Chief Program Officer, Landesa