Property Ownership to Go Digital: UT Plans Property Cards for Village Habitation Areas in Mohali **संपत्ति स्वामित्व होगा डिजिटल: यूटी ने मोहाली के गांव आबादी क्षेत्रों के लिए संपत्ति कार्ड की योजना बनाई** संपत्ति का स्वामित्व अब डिजिटल होने जा रहा है: यूटी प्रशासन मोहाली के गांवों के आबादी क्षेत्रों (village habitation areas) में संपत्ति कार्ड (Property Cards) जारी करने की योजना बना रहा है। ## Property Ownership to Go Digital: UT Plans Property Cards for Village Habitation Areas in Mohali **Property Ownership to Go Digital: UT Plans Property Cards for Village Habitation Areas in Mohali** Property Ownership to Go Digital: UT Plans Property Cards for Village Habitation Areas in Mohali

The Problem With Village Land in a Growing City

Mohali has expanded aggressively over the past two decades. Urban sectors have grown outward, absorbing what were once standalone agricultural villages. Many of those villages have a habitation core — the Abadi Deh or Lal Dora area where families have lived for generations — that exists in a peculiar legal limbo. The houses are real. The families are real. The occupation is multi-generational. The formal ownership documentation, in many cases, is not.

Property within village habitation areas was historically exempt from standard building and transfer regulations. What that exemption actually produced was a large stock of residential property in Mohali's expanding urban footprint that cannot be mortgaged, is frequently disputed at boundaries, and generates no formal property tax record for civic bodies. The plan to issue digital property cards to these areas is an attempt to close that gap.

What the NAKSHA Project Is

The initiative sits under the National Geospatial Knowledge-based Land Survey of Urban Habitations, known as NAKSHA, a central government programme that runs parallel to the PM SVAMITVA Yojana for rural areas. The UT Administration has completed the drone flying and data collection activities across 15 sectors — Sectors 2 to 17, excluding Sector 13 — and five villages of Chandigarh on a pilot basis under the NAKSHA project.

"The high-resolution data collected has been processed to create accurate digital base maps," said Deputy Commissioner Nishant Kumar Yadav after reviewing the implementation of the NAKSHA pilot project with all stakeholders.

The data collection phase is the foundation. What it enables is the next stage. The Administration has advanced towards data validation, integration of ownership records and generation of urban property cards through field surveys. This ongoing phase emphasises citizen verification, enabling property owners to confirm and update their details through a transparent, digital platform.

When fully implemented, NAKSHA is expected to give city residents something that has never existed for village habitation areas: a GIS-accurate digital record of every property, searchable and verifiable without visiting a revenue office. The stated goal is to make land records accessible on demand, reduce the boundary ambiguities that generate most urban property litigation, and give citizens a single source of truth for ownership, area, and encumbrance status.

What a Property Card Actually Does

The difference between living in a house for forty years and owning it, in the legal and financial sense, comes down to documentation. For generations, millions of rural and semi-urban families in India lived in their ancestral homes without any formal paperwork proving that the house or land belonged to them. This lack of legal documentation made it nearly impossible for villagers to take bank loans, settle disputes, sell property, or even qualify for government welfare schemes.

A property card changes that. It is a legal record of rights over the residential plot — issued by the government, backed by drone survey data and GIS coordinates, and linkable to Aadhaar and banking systems. The problems this absence created were serious: no legal ownership proof, land disputes without boundary records, no access to credit as banks could not give loans against undocumented property, and encroachment risk with no legal recourse.

As of March 19, 2026, drone survey has been completed in 3.29 lakh villages out of targeted 3.44 lakh villages nationally under the SVAMITVA scheme. As of January 2026, around 3.06 crore property cards have been prepared across approximately 1.86 lakh villages in India. The urban NAKSHA extension brings the same framework to habitation areas that fall within or adjacent to cities.

Why Mohali's Village Pockets Matter Here

Mohali's urban boundary has expanded to include or surround dozens of revenue villages. These villages contain the Abadi Deh core — typically a dense cluster of residential structures along old pathways — which sits outside the planned sector grid but physically inside the city's functional area.

For Mohali specifically, the villages within or adjacent to the expanding MC boundary — including those in the Aerotropolis acquisition zone and the New Chandigarh corridor — contain significant residential populations whose property ownership exists on trust and custom rather than on formal record. Formalising those records creates a foundation for property tax assessment, loan eligibility, and clean transfer at sale.

The pilot in Chandigarh's sectors and villages demonstrates the process works technically. Extension to Mohali's habitation areas follows the same template at a larger scale, covering a far greater number of families living in precisely the kind of semi-urban village pockets that have grown most rapidly over the last decade.

What This Means for Buyers in the Corridor

For anyone considering property in or near Mohali's village habitation areas, the property card initiative matters in two ways.

First, it converts currently undocumentable property into documentable property. A house in a Lal Dora area that today cannot be mortgaged or straightforwardly sold will, after property card issuance, enter the formal property market. That unlocks both buyers and sellers who were previously excluded.

Second, it provides a clean title chain for future transactions. One of the persistent complications in buying property near Mohali's older village cores is the absence of a registry trail. Property cards create a digital ownership record that can be referenced in future transfers, reducing the risk of competing claims after sale.

There is also a civic revenue dimension. The new Mohali MC mayor has already flagged property tax reform as part of the administration's first-year agenda. A digitalised ownership record for village habitation properties gives the MC a foundation to assess and collect property tax from areas that have never been formally taxed — which affects both the city's revenue base and, eventually, the level of civic services those areas receive.

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Sources
- The Tribune — UT collects data of 15 Chandigarh sectors (Sectors 2 to 17, excluding Sector 13), 5 villages under NAKSHA project, November 2025
- PIB Government of India — SVAMITVA Scheme: drone survey and property card status, March 25, 2026
- Bajaj Finserv — PM SVAMITVA Yojana status as of January 2026
- Ministry of Rural Development, Department of Land Resources — SVAMITVA and NAKSHA scheme national progress data
- BhulekIndia — PM SVAMITVA Yojana explainer, 2026