India has been vigorously adopting an ambitious
e-governance programme for over a decade now. The focus of many of the
e-governance programs is to increase government tax revenues and to reduce cost
of governance.
Given that governments have a monopoly over large
amounts of data and information, and given the advances made in ICT adoption,
there is an opportunity for the government to add to its sources of revenues
significantly by moving to a paradigm of “Service Oriented Administration” or
SOA. The monopoly of the data owned by the government can help the government,
in collaboration with private sector partners to, provide such services to the
citizens that were hitherto impossible to provide and for whom there is no
equivalence in the existing brick and mortar setup of the government.
There are many such services that could be provided
through the concept of “Service Oriented Administration” or SOA, that would
lead to significant increase in government revenue as well as enhance economic
activity in the country.
One of the first such SOA initiatives that would
arguably have the highest impact on the citizens could be Next Generation of
Land Records that could be implemented through a Land and Property Exchange
System (LAPEX). The basic concept of such an exchange is that if stocks worth
crores of rupees could be traded online with absolute security and privacy, why
we can not trade land and property through a similar online system. Of course,
the analogy between stocks and land is not the most straight forward, given the
complexities involved in land and property records management. However, these
differences are not insurmountable. An online Land and Property Exchange would
open up the land and property market by bringing greater liquidity through
enhanced visibility to available properties and greater visibility to potential
buyers.
It is a well known fact based on many a studies that
any improvement in land and property management would have a significant impact
on the GDP of the country. A LAPEX would bring in enormous efficiencies in the
system and would be a win-win proposition for all stakeholders. States such as
Karnataka, which already have a highly evolved set of land and property
management systems in place, are well poised to take this next step. Such an
initiative would allow citizens to buy and sell land and property online. Given
that Government of India has facilitated the setting up of Common Service
Centers (CSC’s) in rural India, the benefits of a LAPEX will be highly
pronounced in the rural areas where rural citizens can trade in land on the
LAPEX through the CSC’s.
Government of Karnataka already has finely crafted IT
systems for managing the current process of land and property management. This
starts from the ‘Mojini’ computerized system for managing pre-mutation property
sketches in rural areas and UPOR ( Urban property ownership records) for
managing property ownership records ( along with it’s map) in urban areas, to ‘Kaveri’
for managing the deed registration and stamp duty collection, to the internationally
acclaimed ‘Bhoomi’ for effecting the mutation of the property. Given this
strong base and given that a considerable number of records are already
“cleaned up”, it is an incremental step to setup LAPEX. Such an exchange could
be setup on a public-private partnership basis with no investment from the
government and with the potential to earn hundreds of crores for the government
through the service charge levied from the citizens.
The system would be an optional system, wherein citizens
can use the traditional mechanism of land and property dealings or could use
the LAPEX, where they can divide their property, find a buyer or seller,
register their sale deed and perform the mutation with only a single visit required
to the government office at the end of the entire process. Moreover, pre-mutation
sketches and Record of Rights can now be kept in a secure, authenticated and
digitally signed format in a USB drive and can be traded 24X7.
In addition, it is also important for the government
to grant (a) apriori right to owners to sell properties where government has no
objections, (b) apriori right to buy to citizens who qualify to buy under the
government rules and regulations such as eligibility to buy agricultural property
and (c) automatic mutation of property after a certain waiting period. Such
granting of apriori rights would make investors more comfortable and would open
up the land market and thus result in additional 1.2 % increase in GDP (pl
quote mechanize report)
Adopting the above process changes would result in
emergence of a property record system which would make it reasonably easy for
transition to the Torrens Title System
or more popularly called as a the Title based system as compared to the current
Deed based system that involves registration of deeds and the need to have a chain
of authentic deeds to prove ownership of a property. t. The proposed LAPEX
would virtually create the Central Registry of clean property records which is
one of the important component of title based system proposed by Robert Torrens as part of the Torrens Title
System. The transition to the title
system, as and when the land laws are amended to provide for the same, would be
fast and less painful, thanks to the LATEX coupled with new processes proposed
in Karnataka , which would create cleaner property records.
LAPEX along with the above process change from the
government would create an explosion of land and property traded in the state.
This will also lead to an enormous increase in the value of land and property
in the state, thus significantly increasing the state GDP.
The time is opportune for the government to move into
the next gear of e-governance adoption and for moving into the paradigm of
Service Oriented Administration. India is a leader in IT and by adopting SOA,
India can also be a thought leader in e-governance. Such a step would not only
increase the revenues of the Government and benefit the citizens, but it would
also help industry by allowing them to transparently buy large tracts of land
for industrial and infrastructure projects. It would also help the IT industry
in “exporting” the service to other countries in the world. Given the
complexities of land and property management and given the criticality of land
for infrastructure development of the nation, LAPEX is absolutely essential for
faster growth of the nation.
