''Villagers have stopped respecting us. Earlier they used to receive us reverentially when we went for revenue inspection. Now they have even stopped offering us coffee.''
Kariappa, 45, Village Accountant

Boriah's wizened face-aged by years of hard labour under the cruel southern sun-crinkles as he flashes a toothless grin. He knows of the predicament of 8,900 men like Kariappa-and he has no sympathy for them.

''They used to be the lords and masters of the village,'' recalls Boriah, 60. ''Whenever there was a split in the family, or the land was divided, we had to beg and plead with the accountant to issue the phani patrike (literally, entitlement paper). We had to bribe these men to get our land records.''

Sonappa, 28, is from another generation but his feelings about Karnataka's village accountants, 8,900 of them, are as virulent. ''Dispute in a family over land meant glad tidings for the accountants,'' says the farmer with disgust. ''The accountants made changes based on whoever paid them the most.''

Fifty-seven km south-west of Bangalore in the village of Hanumanthapura, as in each of Karnataka's 10,000 villages, there is a great sense of freedom and relief taking hold. There is a boldness with which villagers rail at the accountants, a group of low-level bureaucrats who once held absolute power over the village because of their power over the village's most precious asset and commodity: land.

"Though Karnataka was hailed for its IT achievements, it was a shame that technology could not be used to help the masses" Rajeev Chawla, Bhoomi's chief architect

That power over land records has for the first time been wrested from the accountants in Karnataka thanks to a complex but easy-to-use computer system that has gone online in each of the state's 177 taluks.

Today, a villager anywhere in Karnataka need no longer spend days, weeks, even months, pleading, urging-and frequently bribing-the village accountant to issue or change a hitherto hand-written land record. The farmer only has to walk into a village accountant's office and pay Rs 15 to get a modification done or a copy made at any time. And thanks to the innovative use of a raft of technologies (See What's New And Unique), the ability of accountants to manipulate the system has been dramatically curtailed, if not eliminated.

Our Problems, Our Technology

In easing the life of millions of hard-working farmers, Bhoomi (land)-as the system of online land records is called-has shown how widely available technical expertise could be used to bridge the ''digital divide'' that plagues all of India.

''Though Karnataka, and more specifically Bangalore, was hailed for its achievements in infotech, it was a crying shame that technology could not be effectively used to help the masses,'' explains Rajeev Chawla, a portly engineer from IIT Kanpur who is Karnataka's Additional Revenue Secretary and Bhoomi's chief architect. As he points out, the giant project-the most ambitious land records digitisation project ever attempted in India (See Prime Numbers)-needed no new technology. Just getting Bangalore's plentiful software brains to evolve clever solutions using existing technology was enough. It wasn't easy, of course.

It's taken Chawla, his department, and many infotech companies four years from conceptualisation to final implementation in March 2002. It involved the sifting, compiling, scanning, and reviewing-a continuous process, since mistakes from illegible and faulty records are widespread-of 20 million rural land records belonging to 6.7 million Karnataka farmers with retrospective effect. Manual records are now illegal in Karnataka. (If you're interested, the front-end of the system is Visual Basic 7.0, the back-end MS SQL 7.0, with a Windows NT operating system running software in Kannada).

A land record is actually a voluminous form with 28 columns maintained as a loose-leaf register (it still is in most of India). Officially called the Record of Rights, Tenancy and Crop Inspection, the land record is critical to both the government and the farmer. It contains all manner of data related to the land: area, nature and possession of land, whether acquired by registered or unregistered document of succession, partition, mortgage, tenancy, assessment, water rate, classification of soil, number of trees, details of crops grown, land utilisation-there's more. Get the picture?

The Miracle Of Good Governance

In rural India, land records are vital documents, needed to secure crop loans, establish ownership, lineage, and formulate government schemes. The manual system of land records is one of the key reasons for widespread corruption in rural India. The village accountants do not open records to public scrutiny and updating them has been a process plagued by delays, corruptions, and flaws. Even if the accountant is honest, delays were endemic because each accountant handles four-to-five villages. The system was decentralised, which means this vast data meant little to district headquarters.

Not surprisingly, there are nearly 80,000 cases relating to rural land disputes pending in Karnataka's courts, according to government estimates. The system was so flawed that even government land could be usurped, says Chawla. In Bangalore division alone, the records of Rs 250 crore worth of government land has been shown in the name of influential people who manipulated the system.

Apart from making the accountant accountable for all changes, Bhoomi alerts higher officials if cases are pending for a month-after which the accountant must explain the delay. At a key stroke, supervising officials can now monitor work instantly.

The only other project anywhere near this scale is Andhra Pradesh's computerisation of land registration, but it pales in comparison because it only registers land sales and has no record of transactions previous to digitisation.

The Government of India has already recommended Bhoomi as the system of choice to states moving to digitise land records. Goa is implementing a similar system, and the governments of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Sikkim, and Delhi have contacted Chawla for assistance. Bhoomi has been shortlisted for the prestigious international Stockholm Challenge Award for public service technology projects.

A great incentive to take Bhoomi countrywide is that it will eventually be self-sustaining. The Rs 20-crore project, financed by both the state and Central government, has already earned the government Rs 4.7 crore in user charges. It is quite evident that rural users are only too willing to pay nominal fees if service is guaranteed. There are even accountants who welcome Bhoomi. ''It's easier for honest accountants,'' says Nagaraju, 47, of Hoothagere village. ''No more cumbersome writing.''

For those, who bemoan the passing of the free coffee and forced respect, it's time to move on.

TREADMILL

Getting Camara's Quads It's been a week since the world Cup reached its climactic finale, but I still can't get over the images on the TV screen. And I'm not talking about the goal shots, the exquisite tackling moves or the great saves. I'm talking quadriceps, hamstring and calves. Or, simply, legs. I don't remember which match it was-probably the one between Senegal and Sweden, where Henri Camara got the golden goal-but a friend and I decided to watch it over a case of beer. It was a lazy Sunday afternoon and both of us were in shorts. Big mistake. Because, whether you like it or not, you're going to compare your spindly legs to the awesome quads, calves and glutes on display for a full 90 minutes. And feel miserable. My friend made it worse by reeling off some trivia: on an average a professional footballer runs nearly 11 kilometres during every match he plays. And of how footballers are among the fittest sportspeople. The beer tasted flat as both of us tried to hide our legs under our chairs. Legs are the parts of the body that are most neglected by men in gyms. There's a reason for that. Leg exercises are boring. Squats, leg presses and hamstring curls don't have the macho feel of bench presses or preacher curls. And, of course, we normally wear trousers, so the incentive to get great legs is less than, say, ripped arms. But then, legs support the rest of your muscle-bound body. That's reason enough to focus on them even if you're not the beach-combing type. It could be good idea to do exercises focused on your legs at least once a week. While machine-oriented exercises like leg presses, leg extensions or hamstring curls are good, it's the freehand and free-weight exercises that hit the spot. And for legs, there's nothing better than a few sets of squats. I've talked about squats earlier in Treadmill and mentioned how they're not easy exercises. If squats are not done properly, you risk knee and lower back injuries. But it's not difficult to learn how to squat in good form. First, try squatting without weights. Keep your head high, shoulders back and hips low. Your feet should be about shoulder width apart and rooted to the ground. And when you squat, your back shouldn't bend and your thighs should be parallel to the floor. When you've mastered the move, start holding a barbell without weights behind your back and across your shoulders. Then, after a few weeks of that, add weights. In a few months, go out and buy a pair of snazzy shorts. -MUSCLES MANI