Complexities bedevil land administration

The Ministry of Lands (MOL) is entrusted with land administration and management, settlement of the government-owned lands (khas), and vested and abandoned properties. The Ministry is responsible for land acquisition, collection of land development tax, and land surveys, and is responsible for record-keeping, overseeing land-use planning, implementing land reforms, and managing government land development programmes.
While overall land administration and management is the realm of the MOL, only property transfer through registration is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Law and Justice (MOLJ). The Department of Registration in the MOLJ records land transactions (through the Sub-Registrar's Offices across the country) and collects the Immovable Property Transfer Tax.  
It should be noted that there are a few other Ministries and their agencies which also are involved in land governance issues - the Ministry of Forest and its agency dealing with forest land, the Ministry of Fisheries dealing with water bodies, the Ministry of Works through its agencies like Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (RAJUK), Chittagong Development Authority (CDA) dealing with urban land, and the Ministry of Roads and Highways with land along the roads.  
THE STRUCTURE OF MINISTRY OF LAND:  The MOL have four agencies: (i) Land Administration through the Field Administration under Divisional and Deputy Commissioners, (ii) Land Appeal Board, (iii) Land Reform Board and (iv) Directorate of Land Record & Survey (DLRS).  
I.    The Land Administration part is responsible for record keeping and updating, protection of public land/water bodies, Khas and water body management. It also deals with land tax fixation and collection, land transfers and land acquisition for public interest. It leases out public land and water body for limited number of years, is in charge of implementing the sharecropping law, and identifying alluvial or dilluvial land.
II.    The Land Appeal Board is mainly responsible for resolving cases which were tried by AC (land), ADC (Revenue) and Assistant Commissioner (Revenue). After the judgment of the Appeal Board, people could appeal at the judge court (under Law Ministry), which is the first step of judicial procedure. The Land Appeal Board has to resolve issues of tax fixation, mutation or records update and ownership settlement.
III.    The Land Reform Board is mainly responsible for monitoring law implementation processes, facilitating study or collecting citizens' demand on any reform related to land management or administration. Accordingly, the Board makes suggestions, recommendations or proposes alternative laws and sends them to the Land Ministry. The Ministry then takes the initiative to settle the issues.
IV.    DLRS is mainly responsible to prepare map and records according to the position/possession and documents. According to the manual, they concentrate more on position/possession then documents. DLRS does not correct position/possession and documents but only prepares new map and records accordingly. Bangladesh is a museum of manual land record system; digitisation of land record has been introduced only at a very small scale and the process is very slow. Only two sub-districts have so far been completed.  



The Land Administration and Registration Organisation Structure in Fig. 1 is a good starting point to understand the complexity of land administration and the challenges to governance.   
REGULATORY MAZE AGGRAVATED BY INSTITUTIONAL COMPLEXITY: It is evident from Fig. 1 that land administration moves among three institutions - the Director of Surveys though the Settlement Officer, the Director of land records thorough Deputy Commissioner and Assistant Commissioner (AC Land), and Inspector General of Registration through the District Registrar and the Sub-Registrar.  Land-related complications arise because Land records maybe updated: (i) as a result of land surveys (via the Settlement Officer); (ii) (via the sub-registrar office) registering of deeds of sale; and (iii) through inheritance (through AC land office). The process of updating land records is shown in Fig 2. Each of this units has its own time frame of completing their individual tasks, which can be a cause for lack of adequate transparency when dealing with people.  
The issues can be further elaborated by analysing the processes involved in land transfer and those in updating land titles, which are inter-linked; and the outcomes are dependent on how well coordinated is the functioning of the three institutions. Each can easily prove problematic because besides time required in each of the processes, among the three there is only information sharing mechanism, and accountability is only vertically established in each of the three departments. The diversity of ways in which land records maybe updated, and the problems associated with each give rise to numerous disputes and also proliferation of land-related civil and criminal cases, in which the rich and powerful inevitably get the upper hand.
LAND TRANSFER AND THE LAND REGISTRATION PROCESS AND THE OFFICIAL COSTS INVOLVED: Land transfer is undertaken through a process by which land gets registered and the registration document gets handed over to the new owner. Table 2 lists the steps and costs of registration.  There are eight steps and a total of 244 days to complete the registration process.  While the number of steps is comparable with other countries, the big difference is in the number of days it takes to complete the process even compared to India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. However, the cost as percentage of the value would probably be much lower as the full value of the property is not reflected in the registered deeds.  So there are policy and regulatory challenges in this aspect especially from transparency point of view.
While the Registration process apparently has clearly laid-out steps, the problem is within those steps, and as a result, it becomes very difficult for the average citizen to navigate through those maze of steps and processes without the support of intermediaries, which also leads to informal payments.  The Doing Business indicators log this process - the number of steps, the time taken and the costs (see Table 2). The land transfer process involves the necessity of the buyer to crosscheck the authenticity of title with AC Land office before registration of transfer.  The Registration process could become faster if the AC Land/Tehsil office work were better synchronised with the Registration work.  But in reality as noted in the Care Report the following could happen:
* "Some transfers occur on an entirely unofficial basis, perhaps when land is mortgaged, but this is becoming less common.
* Some buyers may not try to check the AC records first…
* and even if they do, these may well not be up to date.
* The deed writers and Sub-Registrar collude to ensure that this step only proceeds if a bribe is paid first, whilst the buyer and seller may also collude to reduce the amount of Immovable Property Transfer Tax (IPTT). There is no requirement to check the legality of the transaction and it is not uncommon for the same plot to be "sold" to several different buyers, although this is much more frequent in urban areas
* Once the transfer is registered the authorised deed is supposed to be issued within a month, but frequently takes a year and the payment of a bribe.
* Once the transfer is registered the land transfer record is supposed to be sent to the AC Land office immediately, but is also subject to delays of several months. Notifications are frequently illegible.
* The AC (Land) generally does not update the record unless informal payments are made.

Dr. G.M. Khurshid Alam is Operations Director of the Policy Research Institute of Bangladesh (PRI).
[email protected]

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The third and concluding part of the article will be published on Saturday, January 07.