Bangladesh has grown in various dimensions since independence its population doubled, its grain production tripled, its economy multiplied 10-fold but there is one valuable resource that has not grown at all because it cannot grow on its own our landmass. Bangladesh has a land mass of 144,000 sp km, which is more or less static overtime (despite hopes of gaining land from coastal siltation). As the number of people is rising & our per capita income is also growing, the demands on the fixed landmas is escalating faster & faster making this scarce resource all the more scarce. No wonder we are seeing land prices skyrocketing like at no other time recent memory. Measure for measure, a strip of land on Gulshan Avenue is more expensive than a parcel of land on the Las Vegas Strip, presumably one of the choicest places on the earth for commercial property. Despite the high cost of land & its relative paucity compared to our large population (we are already one of the most densely populated countries in the world) it's nothing less than amazing that a complete inventory of our land resources is still not done. Our land ownership records are still maintained in the archaic way handed down to us from more than a century ago. The age old system of land record keeping & its management is so faulty that fraudsters & tricksters are having a field day in this country for a long time. I previously wrote about how the land transfer records, ownership records & taxation records & maintained by three separate govt agencies without any mutual accountability among them. As a result land ownership disputes have grown exponentially over the years, so much so that legal experts estimate that a staggering four-fifths of all litigations are land ownership related. Now keeping land ownership records is that so difficult a tast one may wonder. The simple answer is no. Throughout the world computer-based record keeping has greatly facilitated land records management in the last 30 years. Within our vicinity, India, Sri Lanka & Thailand have already achieved simplicity & efficiency in land records management. There is no rhyme or reason why we should not be abld to emulate our neighbours on this. In fact, we should have been ahead of our neighbours in this area since land records computerisation pilots were undertaken in our country since the mid-eighties. Do we ever wonder why in so many places we never seem to graduate out of the pilot phase even though the benefits are so obvious? There have been some progress though the developments are far to slow & to little compared to what is needed to root out the evils in land-records management. These days, if you need a land-ownership record (called a 'porcha') the Department of Land Records & Survey (DLRS) office gives you a computer generated printout in place of the hand written 'porchas' of the past. This has reduced the time from more than a week in the past to a couple of days at present. The process can be further expedited by automating the acual 'porcha' application process, which remains manual. The immediate past DG OF DLRS (the current executive director of Bangladesh Computer Council) took up a project to publish the 'porchas' online through their website
http://www.dgdlrs.gov.bd/ . DLRS sources say more than 40000 porchas of Dhaka City are already uploaded on this site. There have also been a number of proof-of concept computerisation projects as well as land ownership records & maps management in the last five years. The DLRS management appears convinced of the merit of computerisation & committed to mainstreaming the adoption of information technology in their operations immediately. They have proposed a tk 3000 core plan to computerise all land records of the country in the next five year. On the other hand, the registration processes of land title transfer deeds under the Inspector General of Registration (IGR) are being amended to require more definitive proofs of land ownership & possession. In the past the requirements were very lax in this regard. The Law Ministry (the line ministry of IGR) is known to be considering computerised archiving of registered deeds for faster retrieval & cross checking, where necessary. For an effective land administration system, however a seamless computer-based land information system will be required that interconnects the computer systems of the DLRS, IGR & district administration offices. This way, when a land ownership transfer deed is registered on the computer system at the subregistry office, the ownership record at the district revenue administration office (owership title changes called 'mutation' are done here) & at the DLRS office (for issuing up-to-date 'porcha') will be updated contemporaneously. In Kolkata these days, this whole process takes less than an hour. In Dhaka it can take years. It can however be done here in a few minutes also provided the govt & the ruling party & fully committed to making this happen. And by the way, it can all be done without large sums of money from the exchequer. The computer-based land administration system can generate more than enough revenue from the expedited & hasslefree services to pay for itself through build-operate-and-transfer (BOT) financing schemes in pertnership with the private sector. With the current finance minister contemplating a public-private-partnership (PPP) allocation in the ensuing budget, may be this is the route 'Digital Bangladesh' will take in modernising its land administration system.
RSS Feed (xml)
