Bhoomi, Karnataka's digital land records database, was breached in an incident where 19 acres of government wasteland near Bengaluru were illegally transferred to a private individual, reports the Economic Times. The breach was identified by the state revenue department as having been done manually. The ET report claimed that a similar breach of the Bhoomi database occurred two years ago when there was an attempt to change the record of ownership of a 9-acre government plot in Kolar district to private individuals. However, MediaNama was unable to verify this independently, and could not find any resources which pointed to it. Bhoomi was launched in 2000 to digitize all Record of Rights, Tenancy and Crop Information (RTC)/Pahani in the state to weed out corruption, faulty records, and manipulation of land records. "Under this project, all the manual RTCs which prevailed at the time of data entry were digitized and made available to the citizen through Kiosk Centres," says the Bhoomi website. The system was launched to prepare annual set of land records, update crop patterns, facilitate farmers to provide easy access to their land records via the website and app. Biometric fingerprint data is used register for Bhoomi applications "to prevent unauthorized access to database." In 2017, software maintenance and upgradation of the software came to a halt after contractor Accenture Services requested additional funding of Rs 10 crore from the state government to set up a backup server and incorporate security upgrades in the software. Read our data breach reportage here.
