While for the most part living in the modern age of computerization and digital identification, Pakistan still languishes in a stone-age era when it comes to its land management system. According to a study, Land Administration System in Pakistan – Current Situation and Stakeholders’ Perception, conducted by Zahir Ali and Abdul Nasir, the current land administration system in the country is structured on traditional paper-based land registers and cadastral maps. A local land administrator, the so-called “Patwari,” is responsible for their maintenance and for reporting changes on land rights and boundaries of land parcels to the higher level authorities. In practice, the maintenance and quality as well as limited accessibility and reliability of these registers is often an issue.
The shortcomings of Pakistan’s land management system have been clearly visible during the privatization program, which has suffered from the lack of clean title and property rights. For instance, one troubling case involves the sale of 26 per cent shares of the country’s larger telecom operator PTCL to Etisalat of the UAE. Although the sale happened in July 2005, because of a dispute over the legal transfer of land and property titles, the buyer has been holding back payment of about $800 million of the $2.6 billion owed to the Pakistani government.
The land management system in Pakistan will now be put to its ultimate test by the flood of the century. One of the most serious after-effects will crop up in the shape of land grabbing and fake demarcations of boundaries washed away by wanton waters. While in Punjab and Sind provinces computerization has been implemented in bits and pieces, most of the land records in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa are still maintained manually.
In cases where records have been computerized, land demarcations can be verified by retrieving the data but it would be next to impossible to stop land grabbing of areas with damaged or lost records. The demarcation of land holdings of farmers, erased by the flood water, would be difficult to locate, especially in case of small holding, in all the affected provinces. This arrangement creates immense opportunities of corruption involving unlawful land grabs.
A ‘do or die’ situation is evolving for the frightened farmers whose livelihood hinges on the small tracts of land they hold. Since the land management system is used for land revenue assessment and tax collection, local revenue departments will have to face the challenge of re-establishing clear land demarcation. Before starting the rehabilitation and resettlement process, therefore, revenue departments have to act at meteoric speed to remove these fears and take immediate, concrete steps so that land grabbers find it extremely difficult to take advantage of the already devastated farmers.
One of the major problems emerged in Sind province’s ‘Katcha’ area where most of the people move from one place to another without having any proper land ownership documents. The government must take this task seriously and provide them with some documents to confirm their legitimate ownership. To ensure transparency in the entire process of land demarcation, provincial governments must constitute committees consisting of peoples’ representatives, retired judges and social workers known for their honesty, integrity, and uprightness.
In case the government fails to rise to this legal challenge, which is no less daunting than the natural disaster afflicting the country, there will be a deluge of civil litigation, feuds, and social unrest down the road. The judiciary and civil administration is already over burdened. But an injudicious and myopic handling of the land record system can make the situation much worse if the people of Pakistan see the wave of land-related injustice rise as the flood waters recede.
Published Date: September 10, 2010