A Revenue Village is a small administrative region in

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

, a

village A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town (although the word is often used to describe both hamlets and smaller towns), with a population typically ranging from a few hundred ...

with defined borders. One revenue village may contain many

hamlets A hamlet is a human settlement that is smaller than a town or village. Its size relative to a parish can depend on the administration and region. A hamlet may be considered to be a smaller settlement or subdivision or satellite entity to a lar ...

. Each revenue village is headed by a ''Village Administrative Officer'' ''(VAO)''.

History

The advent of the concept revenue village dates back to the system of land reform introduced by Raja

Todar Mal Raja Todar Mal (1 January 1500 – 8 November 1589) was the Finance Minister (Mushriff-i-Diwan) of the Mughal empire during Emperor Akbar's reign. He was also the Vakil-us-Sultanat (Counsellor of the Empire) and Joint Wazir. He was one of the ...

, minister of revenue in the court of Emperor Akbar. The essence of the reform was the assessment of the land revenue according to the extent of cultivation, the nature of the soil and the quality of the crops. In the 18th century, the

Marathas The Marathi people ( Marathi: मराठी लोक) or Marathis are an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group who are indigenous to Maharashtra in western India. They natively speak Marathi, an Indo-Aryan language. Maharashtra was formed as a ...

were to excel in the preparation of area maps of revenue villages for the aid of native rulers. Though at times the system broke down was deployed unevenly within the

Mughal Empire The Mughal Empire was an early-modern empire that controlled much of South Asia between the 16th and 19th centuries. Quote: "Although the first two Timurid emperors and many of their noblemen were recent migrants to the subcontinent, the d ...

, it was the underlying basis of the later day revenue system introduced in

British India The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance on the Indian subcontinent. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one ...

n administration. B. Arunachalam
Indian prelude to British cadastral and revenue maps
Coordinates, March 2006. The revenue village was and is still designed as the lowest administrative unit in the settlement hierarchy. It was designed to improve revenue collection mechanism and regulate the process and not for village planning and development.

References

Government finances in India Local government in India {{India-stub