Srinagar, June 12 -- Somewhere in the dusty office of a patwari in South Kashmir, an old register sits half-open, pages curled and ink fading. It contains family names, borders marked in red, and footnotes scribbled in Urdu.

For decades, it's been the only proof of land ownership for entire villages. Now, that register is supposed to live on a computer screen.

The government wants to digitize land records in Jammu and Kashmir. The software is called WebHALRIS. It was originally built for Haryana, a state with flat terrain and a more settled record of who owns what.

But Kashmir is not Haryana. Land here is not just land. It's memory, inheritance, even dispute.

And putting that into a digital system without checking the facts first is l...