GUJRAT, July 27: The Punjab Board of Revenue has taken serious notice of slow pace of the settlement and computerisation of land record in Gujrat as the district revenue department has not been able to complete settlement in nine years that was to be done in five years according to the plan.

Sources in the Revenue Department told Dawn that the BoR had now asked the Gujrat district coordination officer to get the settlement completed by Dec 31 whereas the deadline for computerisation of the land record was June 30, 2014.

Settlement -- the revision of land record -- had started by the end of 2003 as previously the work had been carried out some 90 years ago in Gujrat.

As most disputes in the district erupted over land it was a longstanding demand of the people of rural areas of Gujrat to initiate the settlement.

The settlement project in Gujrat was first pleaded in 1999 to Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif by MPA Malik Hanif Awan, the district president of Gujrat PML-N. However it could not be initiated despite allocation of funds in the then provincial budget.

When Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi became the chief minister in 2002, he had approved settlement in his native district Gujrat and a huge amount was allocated in the budget.

In September 2003, an independent settlement officer besides extra officers for all three tehsils -- Gujrat, Kharian and Sara-i-Alamgir, other revenue staff, including naib tehsildars, patwaris and clerks, had also been recruited.

Since the initiation of the project all field staff had been shifted from the revenue side to settlement. Around 130 new patwaris, clerks and other staff were especially recruited on five-year contracts. The district government had provided three new vehicles for the staff.

According to the initial target, at least 158 villages should have been settled out of the total 1,084 by the end of 2004. But due to the slow pace of work and inefficiency of the Revenue Department, under which the settlement wing had been working, only 132 villages could be covered until December 31, 2008, according to official data.

The work was accelerated in 2009 and so far the settlement of as many as 788 villages had been completed with more than 70 per cent of work done. But the revenue officials would have to complete the remaining project by the end of this year. An official said it would be very difficult to complete the work in just five months.

Revenue Department sources told Dawn there were many flaws in the work completed as the record had to be computerised after settlement. But the computer system refused to enter the data of 788 villages and the record was returned to the revenue officials concerned for correction. The sources said the correction process had taken around 18 months and in that period record of only 45 villages could be revised. A revenue official said even the field staff had not adopted due procedure while settling.

Holding open assemblies in revenue estates concerned and reading of the current register, ‘Haqdaran Zamin’ (owners of the land), to update names and land owners and to devolve the inheritance to the heirs if not done already was a must. But it could not be done in most of the villages where settlement had been completed. That is why the computer system did not enter flawed data, he added.

The record of 543 mutations was also missing in the settlement, however, after hectic efforts revenue officials found 270 of them and the rest were being traced from old manual record.

Gujrat DCO Asif Bilal Lodhi, who also held additional charge of settlement officer, said he was confident the Revenue Department would meet the deadlines of completing the settlement and computerisation.

He said he had been reviewing progress daily and hopefully it would be completed until December and computerisation until June 2014.