Srinagar, Sept. 8 -- By Mohammad Amin Mir

Walter Roper Lawrence spent the better part of a decade walking Kashmir villages with a chain, a notebook and a mandate to make sense of who owned what.

By the time his settlement closed in the 1890s, the valley had something it had never possessed in usable form: a written record of land, tied to names, revenue, and consequence.

That record, the Jamabandi, outlived empires.

Families settled inheritance disputes by it, banks lent money against it, while courts decided ownership by it.

A piece of paper, filled in by hand, became the closest thing Kashmir had to a deed of belonging.

More than a hundred years on, Jammu and Kashmir's revenue department is attempting something it describes in sim...