Security of title, it is generally thought, is one of the advantages of buying land from the State; but I grieve to state my experience is that the reverse is the case, and will so remain until the following is done:--
_First._ The Government should learn _what is and what is not theirs to sell_. Such an absurdity, then, as Government ascertaining, years after the auction, that they had sold lands they had no right to sell, could not be.
_Secondly._ That before land is sold it be properly surveyed and demarcated; and what might so easily have been done, and which alone would have compensated for much of bad procedure in other respects, that the simple and obvious plan before the sale, of sending a European official to show the neighbouring villagers and intending purchasers the boundaries of the land to be sold, be resorted to.
This last simple expedient would have saved some grantees years of litigation, and many a hard thought of the said grantees against the Government. It would naturally occur to any one at all conversant with the subject; but, _alas!_ in India this is often not the condition under which laws are made.
But there is another difficulty at the back of all this.
Though the Waste Land Rules enact that the Government, and not the grantee, shall be the defendant in any claim for land within a lot sold, practically the said enactment in no way saves grantees from litigation. Claimants for land always plead that it is _not_ within the boundaries of the land sold, and _ergo_ the grantee is made the defendant to prove that it is. The villagers never having been shown the boundaries by any Government official (for it is not enacted in the Waste Land Rules), the question whether the land claimed is within or without the boundaries is an open one, not always easily decided, and the suit runs its course.
I even know of cases where, though survey has been charged for at the exorbitant rate of four annas an acre, the outer boundaries of the lot have never been surveyed at all, but merely copied from old Collectorate maps, which showed the boundaries between the zemindaree and waste lands.[2] Is it strange, then, if buying lands from Government is often buying litigation, worry, loss of time and money.