Service Oriented Administration (SOA) and Next Generation of Land Records

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.