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Computerising land records

Make taskforce's recommendations public
THE five-member taskforce on Mqdernisation of Land
Management and Registration, led by former adviser Abdul Muyeed Chowdhury, has finalised its proposals in seven months^ time While felicitating the effort, .we urge the government to make its recommendations public for the sake of associating all the stakeholders with their eventual adoption.
We, in this paper, whenever an occasion arose seized it to highlight the dire need for digitisation of land records, registration and documentation. The moth-eaten archival remnants have been susceptible to tampering of all kinds. It bore a shameful testimony to our primitive land management practices, completely out of sync with the new millennium. There are two sets of land survey documents, one the Cadastral Survey (CS) conducted in 1890-1940, and the other Revisional Settlement (RS) recorded in 1969-83, which being worn out need to be digitised for preservation and use. Furthermore, these will have to be updated not only for the present but on a continuing basis to reflect the situation on the ground in terms of sale, transfer, inheritance and ownership rights.
We have learned the hard way that without a firm basis in land records and documentation any land reform endeavour is bound to be a fiasco. The best guarantee for optimal land utilisation stems from well-documented land records. This holds good both for government khas lands as well as for land holdings in the private sector.
Among the high points of taskforce proposals are posting all land-related government documents on internet, revaluation of different categories of land, and of course, digitisation of all maps and land-related government documents.
Aside from centralised documentation, upazila and zonal land offices will be able to keep land records locally. So the layers are proposed to be reduced for providing service.
One of the multiple benefits of computerisation deserving special mention is the projected drastic fall in the number of civil and criminal cases of which 70 to 80 percent are centred around land disputes. What a social dividend that would be!
The taskforce proposal for reducing the number of agencies dealing with land affairs from the current six to only three such as Directorate of Land Records and Surveys, Registration Department and the district administration (but only in a monitoring role) merits consideration.
Overall, what we take heart from is the experts' assessment that the entire reform is deliverable with the present strength of the government and by using local resources without recourse to any foreign consultancy. So, what are we waiting for? This government should follow it up with a public discourse leading to constitution of a land commission as the institutional basis for implementation of the modernisation programme.