Bribery in land offices

The findings of the Transparency International, Bangladesh (TIB) study concerning graft and other irregularities in the government land offices are least surprising. These are not startling for the people who have to deal with the officials and other functionaries at different tiers of the country's land administration offices. Thousands of people seeking different types of services from these offices everyday across the country do feel the pinch of the widespread graft regime. A service-seeker has to grease the palms of almost everyone, from top to bottom, at the land offices to get things done. At times, even payment of bribe money does not necessarily guarantee the delivery of the required services.

Then there are middlemen or 'dalals' who in exchange for some money for themselves and land office personnel, make promises to get things done. In most cases they deliver the services as promised. However, on occasions, they cheat some service-seekers who, in most cases, are illiterate and poor. Land offices are the places where no distinction is made between powerful and powerless people, genuine and fake land owners and literate and illiterate service-seekers as far as squeezing out some extra amount of money from them is concerned. Everyone has to spend money well beyond what is required lawfully. The influential people can secure expeditious delivery of services, but they too have to pay bribe money.

The ability to pay hefty amounts of bribe to the unscrupulous section of land officials on occasions help some people to grab lands belonging to the weaker sections of society or to the government. In most cases, forged documents are prepared and the genuine ones are removed from official files to create fake owners. These are quite old and known stories. However, disputes over land ownership and fierce competition to own a piece of land are an usual phenomenon in a country with one of the lowest land-man ratio in the world. Murders, clashes and litigations involving the land ownership are very common. Nearly 1.8 million litigations over land disputes are reportedly awaiting disposal in different courts across the country. This figure alone speaks volumes about the importance of land in this country. Bribery in offices of land administration has thrived mainly because of poor management of a resource which is considered very precious by all sections of the people. The system of land record-keeping that dates back to the British Raj has not changed much even after so many decades. There were initiatives in the recent past to digitise the land record-keeping system. Unfortunately, there has not been any remarkable progress to this end and manual record-keeping is still the order of the day in government land offices.

The government, though belatedly, has acknowledged the importance of improving the land management system and included strategies in the Seventh Five Year Plan to this effect. The TIB has put a number of suggestions to strengthen the land management system, help reduce the hassles the people face and curb the practice of bribe-giving in land offices. The authorities might find a few of those useful. Moreover, the existence of a large number of unsettled land-related cases in courts -- some of the cases are even several decades' old -- does underline the need for employing some kind of alternative dispute resolution mechanism even at the grassroots level.