On a drowsy afternoon in February 2022, Rambachan Rajbhar took a sip of milky tea and unfurled a newspaper on a desk in his one-room internet café in Surhan, a village in the eastern corner of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Outside, a herd of buffaloes lumbered down the lane, a hand-pump wheezed and the wails of a Hindi soap opera spilled into the air. 

Rambachan—41 years old, with a patchy moustache and a mop of hair tossed to one side—slid an ink-smudged finger along the classifieds. It navigated through a jumble of tenders, advertisements for language classes and matrimonial listings, slowing over a government notice inviting applications for a liquor-shop licence. Rambachan had long been looking for a second stream of income. A government-backed theka was just the kind of business that wouldn’t be susceptible to bad harvests, bureaucratic delays and protracted election cycles; people always drank, even more so when life felt like it was shifting underfoot, as it often did in this impoverished part of the country.

To apply, he needed some basic identity documents—his ID card, ration card, bank statements and passport photos—which he pulled out from a cloth folder stored beneath his desk. Lastly, as collateral, he required printouts of land-ownership records: proof that he was a joint heir, along with nine of his cousins, to two acres of earth scattered across three plots hemmed in by thorn trees, which their grandfather had left them in their nearby ancestral village. 

Rambachan cracked his knuckles and waited for the Uttar Pradesh land records portal to load on a second-hand desktop. The machine hiccuped, stalled and then came to life with a long, sputtering sigh, as if reluctant to deliver bad news. In a single moment, Rambachan learned that all three of his family’s plots now stood registered in the name of a stranger, meaning that his inheritance—as well as the possibility of starting his liquor shop and thereby ascending into the lower middle class—had vanished.