High‐resolution property: Drone enclosures in digital India

Drawing from ethnographic research on the implementation of Svamitva, one of the largest digitalized property titling schemes in the world, this paper examines how new drone and geospatial technologies are being deployed to enclose rural customary lands across contemporary India. Focusing on the initial processes of droney survey, GIS mapping and data‐creation under the scheme, the paper argues that the creation of ‘high‐resolution property’ is achieved not through simple technological observation, but rather via the imposition of a new regime of perception. One coordinated through the speculative and ideological property‐making practices of drone surveyors, GIS technicians, and local residents. This new regime of perception aims to extract individual ownership lurking within collectivity, subdivide collectivised lands, and cleanly link rural property to global asset markets and digital public infrastructures. In doing so the paper seeks to provincialise contemporary geographical scholarship on property technology or PropTech, drawing from the diverse property systems and emerging technological apparatus of the Global South, and examine the lively and mediated sociotechnical practices required to convert hundreds of thousands of rural territories into high‐resolution private titles and data‐points. In doing so, the paper seeks to challenge the overt techno‐determinism and solutionism within official debates concerning property digitalization, highlighting instead the ways digitialized property remains socially, ecologically and institutionally mediated.