The tenuousness of land rights in rural and urban Bangladesh is deeply troubling. Urgent issues of extortion and delays in digitised land management offices are topics of civil rights organisations and legal experts at national land reform seminars in Dhaka. The government’s Smart Bhumi Seva programme of introducing e-mutation platforms and digital land surveys across the country has failed to benefit thousands of landowners, with them continuing to pay dubious prices to Union Land Officers and go-between land agents to rectify administrative faults and ensure ownership is processed, reports reveal. Authorities stress that human intervention is being cut down with digital automation when questioned about the harassment that continues. However, if there is no oversight and rigorous administrative responsibility, digital land platforms can easily be exploited to defraud citizens and to tamper with land records.
The lack of clear, provable and easy-to-use land administration systems poses an immediate threat to the rights of millions of people, contributes to unending land-related family disputes and deters investments, both at home and abroad, at a high cost to national economic development. The catastrophic legal costs, land grabbing and physical eviction faced by low-income citizens and vulnerable rural families follow the land office’s inability to prevent predatory intermediaries from modifying digital ledgers (khatian) and from refusing routine mutation applications. This continuous corruption of the administration of justice jams the judiciary with around 2.81 lakh pending cases relating to land use and allotments, in addition to another 46 lakh pending cases in the country. This has caused general political unrest, poverty and marginal farmers’ disenfranchisement in all 64 districts of the country.
This is not new, as land administration is a longstanding issue in Bangladesh, which has been plagued by bureaucratic extortion and procedural complexity. In recent years, successive administrative reforms have been made to improve land records, but land offices at the field level have been notorious for corruption and delays in the past decade. It has unfortunately become a persistent problem that citizens are denied basic legal security over their land by regular land transfers being deliberately delayed by local land officials and then followed by demands for informal payments.
The ministry has revamped its Smart Land Management Roadmap and is conducting a nationwide digital land survey initiative to digitise all land survey records and map the land using drone technology, and to automate land development tax collection throughout the country, all of which have added to the urgency of this crisis. In this all-encompassing approach, digital land databases are intended to combat fraudulent land titles, duplicate registrations and provide easy online services to landowners. The state wants to modernsze land administration and to eradicate land disputes, but specifically how the digital systems will ensure that land officials do not tamper with digital records is not fully taken up in practice.
Widespread evidence has been cited through legal research bodies and anti-corruption accountability agencies of how third-party operators (dalals) have worked in collusion with local land office staff to twist application queues on the online platform and to slow down the approval of e-mutation applications. In addition, land audits have always found that there are significant differences between the physical books and the newly digitised databases, so there are opportunities for land grabbers to take control of the land. With legal costs, unofficial payments and lost productivity of property helping to absorb vital capital that could be used to stimulate local economies, the financial toll continues to take its toll.
Research assessments of the national land governance system emphasize that LGR is not about taking land records to the cloud, but an ecosystem issue. The land management matrix is a highly complex one, including officials from the ministries, sub-registrars, survey departments, local land officers, the digital service centers, and the judiciary. Often there is also inter-agency coordination that is disjointed, with differing data from land surveys, no integration across registers and databases with land management bodies in real time, and outside the effective oversight parameters.
This is a key shift in land management reform and digital governance efforts that needs to be taken into account in land management reform assessment. While establishing online land portals or doing drone surveys is significant, the underlying corrupt administrative system is equally crucial, as it ensures that fraud is sped up as well. A badly written record that is then digitised is not much better consolation when corrupt officials can manipulate online records behind the scenes. The main issue is not just that Bangladesh can digitise millions of documents relating to land, but whether it has the administrative integrity and legal enforcement to ensure that citizens do not fall prey to extortion at the land office.
The government has continually stated its desire to establish a smooth, fully electronic land management system and land rights for citizens. Land officials say they are promoting digital literacy drives, tracking e-mutation processing times and disciplining corrupt officers in the department. But have these safeguards for the system worked as they should, and why do people still report that they are being extorted in local land offices, and why are there still so many land disputes in the court backlog?
None of this is to say that there is anything wrong with digitising land records or making land surveys modern. But it leaves a significant number of unanswered questions unaddressed before the discussion gets swept up by portal stats, digital survey coverage and big policy pronouncements. Citizens must first become aware of what specific steps will be taken to eradicate human corruption from Digital land offices, before they can declare success with land automation.
The problem of land governance has not only been a deficiency of modern technology or law in Bangladesh. It is the lack of administrative integrity and statutory accountability in the land systems we are operating that has caused the shortage. The integrity of our land administration must be much better safeguarded before we entrust citizens’ key rights to land to automated systems.
Modern smart land management promises title security, economic stability and the end of litigation of property. But the danger is administrative extortion supported by digital interfaces. Increased reliance on digital platforms by state policy, without any measures to eliminate institutional corruption, increases the vulnerability of citizens to land grabbing and legal harassment. These administrative shortcomings go beyond the technical and are exacerbated by weak administrative oversight, insufficient rural land offices, and inadequate civil service oversight.
But the question that has long loomed over land reform programmes is whether technology means justice. Good governance in land administration must remove institutional corruption, adhere to time limits of administration and prevent everyday owners of property from being exploited by the administration. The most advanced digital database can’t replace a land office that extorts for service to be provided.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author
The writer is an LLB student, Department of Law, World University of Bangladesh
