Revenue Minister of Maharashtra was also supportive but a change of government thwarted any practical action. The director of the National Housing Bank proposed to the Chief Minister in 1990 that pilot activities be implemented in urban areas of Madhya Pradesh, on the grounds that title registration would reduce credit constraints to housing development. Madhya Pradesh was felt to be an appropriate choice of state, as it was sufficiently large for such a pilot yet urbanization was 'manageable', and some moves had already been made to computerize land records in the state. Overall, the most promising states for pilot activities in different parts of the country appear to be: Maharashtra or Gujarat (West); Kamataka, Tamil Nadu or Kerala (South); Haryana (North); and Madhya Pradesh (Central)<sup>32</sup> .

The range of possible stakeholders in records of rights in land is large, however, and is not restricted to those with interests in rural land affairs. Conclusive title is likely to be particularly attractive to urban as well as rural stakeholders, including potential purchasers of residential property, housing and urban development corporations, and financial institutions that extend credit for housing development (Bijlani and Rao 1993). Table 4 provides a very rough first attempt to indicate some of the relevant stakeholders. It groups stakeholders according to the potential importance of the proposed reforms to respective stakeholder groups, and the relative degree of influence the stakeholders may be expected to have over the outcome (whether to support or oppose reforms). Provided certain safeguards are built into the process of land settlement and title registration to protect the urban poor and socially excluded groups including those legally regarded as 'squatters', improvements in land administration could also assist in the more effective implementation of policies concerning resettlement and rehabilitation in urban (and rural) development.

Other stakeholders are likely to oppose reforms in the existing system of land conveyancing and land administration, unless specific steps are taken to make reforms more attractive to them. Such stakeholders include the village record keepers _(paiwaris_ or revenue inspectors), large land owners who manage illegally to evade land ceilings, those in the legal profession who stand to profit from litigation, and urban development corporations with vested interests in the circulation of so-called 'black money' to facilitate developments that evade legal regulations (e.g. the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act). The legal profession, for example, could be expected to benefit from the additional work generated by land adjudication under revisional surveys for some considerable time to come. It is difficult to make generalizations about the likely balance between those supporting reforms and those opposing them, but it is essential that this type of stakeholder and institutional analysis be conducted to guide the preparation of concrete proposals in selected states. To the extent that pro-reform stakeholders in urban areas have greater political voice than those in rural areas, urban-rural coalitions are likely to prove useful in galvanizing support for reforms in land administration.

General consensus has emerged from preliminary work on urban land markets in India that the legal and regulatory framework - chiefly the Land Acquisition Act 1894 and the Urban Land Ceilings and Regulation Act 1976 - is over-complex, impedes urban development, and severely constrains access to serviced land by the urban poor (Bijlani and Rao 1993, Muttagi 1996). Evasion is widespread, and it is common practice to delay land acquisitions through

> 32 Professor D C Wadhwa, personal communication. Criteria for this selection included: expectation of support from state government, and current status of records of rights in land (e.g . recent revisional surveys conducted).

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