Graft, middlemen reign supreme in land offices

Efforts of the government to eliminate middlemen and corruption from the country's land offices are going in vain as middlemen and a section of dishonest officials, in an unholy nexus in the country's land offices, still reign supreme.
A report in a national daily last week said scores of middlemen had for long been prowling the land offices and are making normal service delivery dysfunctional.
The department has reportedly established a digital archive of the cadastral and the state acquisition survey maps of the whole of Bangladesh. It has also started delivering services using the archives to check against activities of middlemen and corruption. With the introduction of the digital archives of maps, people are otherwise expected to get prints of maps in 10 minutes after the payment of formal fees. Due to the alleged intervention of the middlemen, such a job is not also that much easy.
A national household survey, conducted by the Transparency International, Bangladesh in 2012 on 7,554 households, showed that 92 per cent of the households were forced to pay bribe for land-office services. The survey also noted that the average informal fee was Tk 7,807 that service-seekers had to pay to get jobs done.
However, an initiative was taken to deploy Ansar personnel in and outside the department of land administration to evict middlemen and limiting the scope for corruption. But the ministry of land did not reportedly give the required approval. So the people, even after making formal payments, are often forced to pay informal fees to middlemen and land officials for services.
According to the report, people seeking services from land offices have no other option but to pay money to middlemen. The middlemen, in connivance with a section of dishonest land officials and other members, have developed an otherwise meticulous system for providing services against payment of 'speed' or bribery-related money, over the years.
The people thus face undue harassment if they do not want to give such money and do want to get such jobs done following the official procedures. Only those who pay middlemen and land officials can get their jobs done within the shortest possible time. The additional payments are made at different stages of land mutation, registration, collection and search for land-related documents, survey, payment of land development taxes, government land allocation and other services.
On its part, the ministry of land did hardly take any bold step to break the system and eliminate middlemen's involvement in the process. However in 2011, it had directed all divisional and deputy commissioners to act against 'dishonest land officials and employees' at the grassroots to end the public sufferings. The move did not make any impact on the overall scenario of the mismanagement.
A recent letter of the secretary of the ministry of land that was sent to all deputy commissioners and divisional commissioners, said that the people going to land offices and offices of assistant commissioners (land) for mutation and other purposes were being harassed in many ways. The letter also noted that some officials were charging additional money for various services and were deliberately delaying service delivery, flouting the rules and causing sufferings to clients.
There has so far been no visible follow-up action on this letter as well. The deputy commissioners, for unknown reasons, did not take any action against 'dishonest land officials and employees' at the grassroots. However, the ministry is yet to issue any fresh directives for the officials concerned to root out the middlemen's presence and corruption from the land offices.
Of late, there are as many as 120 million people of the country who are now victims of land-related disputes. The amount of money that the contesting parties, involved in the process of litigation, spend on account of legal and other related expenses is reportedly double the size of the country's development budget.
In fact, the government was set to digitise the land management system by this year to help resolve complications in the land-related issues as well. It has also a plan to deliver all land-related services like survey, registration, mutation etc., from one single office in order to mitigate public sufferings. A roadmap for land management was supposed to be in place by now. Adequate allocation was made for this purpose in the national budgets of the past few years. But things did not make any encouraging headway so far.
In fact, there has not yet been any concrete planning as to how to digitalise the old manual system of registration though it is being told repeatedly that the government is going to overhaul the land registration offices soon. This was set to be done through introducing digital archiving of the documents with a view to reducing fraud and litigation in connection with land ownership.
Shoddy and hackneyed management of land recording is mainly responsible for fraud and manipulation in land ownership. This has given birth to land grabbers and their cohorts. More than 80 per cent of litigations in the courts of law in Bangladesh are over the disputes relating to land ownership; millions of conmen, middlemen, lawyers and other functionaries are involved in matters of civil law and those connected with the proceedings in the courts are thriving on the business of litigations.
Due to the age-old land management system, corruption has now taken an institutional shape. The obsolete regulations persist mostly on account of the existing 'rent-seeking' operational practices by land officers, revenue collectors and surveyors. Some of them very often produce doctored records, thus forcing the land owners to bribe them to keep proper records of their land. Other than this, a few sub-registrars, revenue officers and surveyors do also allegedly tempt secretly the squatters to take over the land of the innocent owners.
Country's land offices need to be streamlined and freed from the clutches of the middlemen. This can be only done by overhauling the land management and land administration system. In fact, a corruption-free land management system is considered to be a major yardstick for evaluating the state of law and order in all civilised societies.
 szkhan@dhaka.net