The patwari keeps the land records for a circle of villages: who owns what, who cultivates it, what is grown, what is mortgaged, and every change.
The office is old. It existed under the Mughals, was formalised under the Sikh state and codified by the British, and it survives largely unchanged because nothing has replaced it.
The girdawari, the crop inspection, is done twice a year by the patwari walking the fields and recording what is standing in each. Compensation for a flood or a hailstorm depends on that entry.
A patwari's entry determines a family's ability to borrow, sell, inherit or claim compensation. The position carries very little pay and enormous discretion, and the consequences of that combination are the subject of a large body of complaint and litigation.
Digitisation has made the record public and has not changed who makes the entry.
Bhagat Singh's grandfather's generation, Har Gobind Khorana's father, and a great many Punjabi families of modest means, were patwaris. It was the standard route out of cultivation into a salary.
The patwari keeps the record of rights, the field map and the crop inspection for a circle of villages, and every transaction in land passes through what he writes.
The girdawari, the seasonal crop inspection, determines compensation after a flood or a failure, which makes the patwari the person a village most needs on its side.
Digitisation has changed the form of the record and not the position. The office is the oldest continuous piece of administration in the Punjab and it long predates the British.