A modernised land administration under which the key services like land registration, mutation, collection of land development tax, issuing land-related documents, etc could be provided to the public without hassle has long been a big challenge before the government. In fact, procrastination in service delivery is inbuilt in a system where all kinds of land-related transactions are done and records maintained manually. Add to that the corruption that the system is rife with. Under the circumstances, the obvious way out of the prevailing mess in the land administration should be an automated service delivery regime on a digital platform.
Against this backdrop, it is reassuring to learn that come January 2023, the government is going to launch a service styled, Land Service Customer Care Centre (LSCCC), at the Bhumi Bhaban (land building) in the Tejgaon area of the city. And any willing client may visit the LSCCC, or the Centre, for short, personally, or make calls from the dedicated telephone numbers kept for the purpose to avail of any legal advice or land-related service from the Centre. To this effect, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has also reportedly been signed between the Ministry of Land and Aspire to Innovation (A2I), an agency of the ICT department. This is admittedly a welcome move from the government towards facilitating the land-related service for the service-seeking public. But the most important question that one would like to ask is how far the work of a fully automated land record service, especially under the three projects launched earlier to this end, has progressed.
One would like to recall at this point that the government made the move towards automation of the land record and registry system a decade back. A contract was signed to this effect with a consortium of local IT companies in 2012. A major part of the work, developing the software, was also learnt to be completed by 2014. Among others, an important part of the task relating to prompt delivery of the original deeds to the service-seeking clients, reportedly has been completed. It is worthwhile to note that people still have to wait even for years and spend a lot of money for getting this particular service. However, for unknown reasons, further progress of the work came to a halt. As a result, the age-old, corruption-laden system of service delivery in the land administration continued.
Worse, some online services including e-mutation that were available at the pilot scale have allegedly been costlier than the manually-provided service. Moreover, most people were not aware of the digital services like e-mutation, land development tax, civil-suit management, digital databank, hotline, map collection, certified copy of record of rights, khatian service and mouza map available on the pilot scale. Now that the government appears to be all set to offer land-related online client service to the public, it would also be necessary to educate the public so that they might easily access the services. Also, the services to be provided online should be cheaper than the still existing analogue service. Especially, the call centre 333 said to be working to provide centralised information service including addressing complaints should be able to deliver the service as promised.