Monday, September 29, 2014, Zul.Hajj 03,1435 A.

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Land record computerisation

The computerisation of land records is an important step towards expanding e-governance and a
shift

The emergence of e-governance, or ICT-enabled governance, is
expanding economies through knowledge networks as the role of
information in e-governance process has increased manifold. This has
resulted in dissemination of information across the entire digital network,
enabling equal access to information to everyone.

Our centuries old land management system has been based on
inherently defective manually generated land records. The
computerisation of land records is an important step towards expanding
e-governance and a shift towards a digital economy. It has been
necessitated by the prevalence of an outmoded system of hand-written land records suffering from a host of
issues including inaccuracy, complexity, corruption, exploitation by the patwari and incessant litigation besides
loss of land revenue to the government.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan on June 30, 2012 directed all the provinces to computerise land records within
three months.Work on land records computerisation has been in progress for several years, with varying
degrees in the provinces. Punjab is scheduled to complete the process by 2014.The Sindh Revenue Board has
started work in the form of a central database connected with 27 facilitation
centres and integrated with a digital mapping system. Work in Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa is also at an advanced stage. However, KP s Revenue Minister
Mohammad Shuja Khan told the provincial assembly on June 19 that the revenue
department s experience in Mardan district was disappointing as litigation cases
registered an increase after digitisation of the record.

Computerisation of land records is being widely hailed to end corruption and the
patwari culture. However, the concept goes well beyond this simple metric to a
holistic approach within the larger perspective of agrarian reform. The present
approach is limited to transposing manual records on computers, creation of
databases and generation of electronic printing to minimise the patwari s interface/control of the system.




The patwari is the custodian of about one and a half dozen land revenue records related to land titles, maps,
mutations and land revenue. The relevant registers are in a dilapidated form and in a lingo that only the patwari
can decipher. Maps do not follow cartographic rules and are based on approximate measurements. Accurate
and updated land records are crucial for the security of the ownership and tenurial rights besides a range of
other uses including proper enforcement of ownership rights
resulting in minimisation of land disputes and litigation,
assessment of land revenue or water rate, cropping patterns,
securing loans, leases, mortgaging, sale, purchase and
mutations, accurate inheritance rights and registration of
immovable property. It can also help in the elimination of
agricultural tax evasion, and optimizing the remission of taxes
and cesses to the drought and flood-affected areas. The
system is also highly valuable for the revenue department in
terms of information updating, query response, reporting,
customisation, fraud detection as well as modernising the
management of land records that results in enhancing
transparency, ensuring safe maintenance, minimising property
disputes, and facilitating smooth service delivery to the public
in the form of a single window to provide fast and efficient
retrieval of information, both graphical and textual, at a low
cost, speed and accuracy. Thus, it lays a foundation of e-
governance at the grassroots.

If properly planned and executed, the system has the potential to meet requirements of a large set of users. It
can help in land use planning on the basis of accurate surveys and documentation of the land area, to help in
planning for various developmental programmes through such tools as creation of a land information system
and database for agricultural census. It can be used to ensure efficient land markets and to encourage
investment. The information can eventually help as a decision support system for a sound land reform,
facilitating enforcement of stipulated land holding ceilings.

The system comprises various records related to title, property transfer and revenue assessment besides crop
pattern and yield trends, and encompasses a process of record preparation, maintenance and updating. It is
composed of static data (e.g. Record of Rights) and dynamic data (e.g. online mutations module for ownership
changes, khasra girdawari/seasonal crop updation, roznamcha, etc.). The process starts with
establishing/strengthening the necessary institutional structure through
induction of specialised staff for computerisation, setting up of computer
centres at the tehsil, sub-divisional and district levels and a monitoring cell at
the provincial level. Digitisation work involves completion of data entry works,
digitisation of spatial maps, setting up of servers/databases, and
interconnection of widely distributed data in computer centres through Wide
Area Networks and onwards integration with national databases. State of the
art technology is available to assist the process, including development of
village index base maps by geo-referencing cadastral maps with satellite
imagery, for creating core GIS and integration of three layers of data, i.e.
spatial data from aerial photography through Geological Survey of Pakistan
maps, user interface and database system for navigation, query, analysis,
reporting, decision making and strategy planning. Due to the sophistication
and complexity of the new system, high quality pre-service and in-service
computer training for the revenue, survey and settlement staff and strengthening of training infrastructure is
required besides awareness of software applications for smooth operation of the system including testing,
debugging and updating.

Some aspects of the new system being introduced need attention. It appears that every province is
experimenting with its own module while there should be uniformity all across the country. Second, mere
computerisation itself is no guarantee against malpractices, fraud and corruption. Unless the data and its
communication media are hermetically secured, leakages are quite possible, as for example, any large set of
data can be copied or stolen on a peripheral storage device/medium such as a disk. The system can be
vulnerable to virus attacks destroying entire datasets.

Tampering/alteration of record entries as well as hacking of data on the WAN or Internet is possible. Last but
not the least, the frequency and magnitude of power outages makes practicability of the system highly doubtful.
This spells out the requirement for impeccable security, safety and integrity standards for the system to succeed

The writer is studying International Development

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