Srinagar, May 27 -- For most of his life, Ghulam Nabi, 72, believed a narrow strip of farmland outside his village in Kupwara belonged to his family.

The claim was based on stories passed down by his father and a handwritten deed from the 1960s.

But when a neighbour recently began building on that land, Nabi went to the local revenue office to find the truth. What he got was a shrug.

The records, they said, were "somewhere" in a locked storeroom, and possibly damaged by water.

Now, that kind of uncertainty may finally be ending.

At a high-level meeting last week in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir's Chief Secretary Atal Dulloo told senior officers it's time to "work with urgency and precision" to complete the region's land record digitiza...