RAWALPINDI: Instead of completing the digitisation of land records in the province, the PTI-led Punjab government has begun to reintroduce the patwari system in land revenue departments in the name of reforms.

A senior Punjab Land Revenue Authority (PLRA) official told Dawn that the Punjab Board of Revenue has asked divisional commissioners to allocate two revenue circles – known as kanungoi – in each district that will be controlled by a tehsildar and patwaris and serve as a model.

In Rawalpindi, the Mandra and Chakri were chosen in response to a letter from the Punjab Board of Revenue to the divisional commissioner at the end of January. The reforms will be introduced there on an experimental basis in these two circles.

The official said that the manual land records system had burdened the entire legal system becauseit could be altered by patwaris and field revenue officials, which was brought to an end by the computerised system.

He said the Punjab bureaucracy is trying to persuade the government that the manual system was better than the computerised alternative.

Divisional commissioners asked to allocate two revenue circles which will be controlled under old system as ‘models’

“In this way, the powers of entry of mutation and attestation will be transferred from Arazi Record Centres to patwaris, revenue field officers and tehsildars. Handling this system manually would create social chaois and throw many small farming families out of the system through manual deeds, records and mutations,” he said.

A senior district administration official said there would be a parallel system, with most land records computerised and a few revenue circles managed using the old patwari system.

He said Punjab moved to computerise its land records under a project sponsored by the World Bank worth billions of rupees known as the Land Records Management and Information System that aimed to end the centuries-old patwari system.

The transparency brought a paradigm shift because land records became accessible to everyone without having to grease palms, the official said. The project’s success led to it being converted to law under the Punjab Land Record Authority Act 2017.

According to data from the PLRA, 90pc of the province’s land records have been computerised. A total of 152 records centres have been working across Punjab, providing services to landowners.

Fard issuance and mutations generated Rs17 billion in revenue in the 2018-19 fiscal year.

The district administration official said that digitising land records reduced property-related disputes and litigation in the province because records became easily accessible and could not be tampered with.

He added that only 600 complaints were made against the PLRA in the 2018-19 fiscal year on the Prime Minister’s Complaints Portal.

He said that initially, the revenue secretary wrote a letter to all the deputy commissioners of the province, on directions from senior Board of Revenue member Babar Hayat Tarar, to nominate a revenue circle as a model circle that would be “given back to patwaris”.

The Board of Revenue member addressed all Punjab commissioners in this regard on Jan 15 and it was decided that computerisation would be replaced with the old system.

PLRA officials said that reintroducing the patwari system would cause more than 589 service centre official seats at 115 new records centres to be withdrawn.

The PLRA official said that the role of these records centre officials is limited to data entry. He said the computerised system needs to be improved and the number of posts needs to be increased so people can access their land records without delay.

Punjab Law Minister Raja Basharat told Dawn that reviving the patwari system has been proposed, but the government has not made a decision yet.

He said they are completing their homework on this proposal, which will create parallel systems of manual and computerised land records systems in the province.

However, the minister also said it would not be possible to run two parallel systems for land revenue records. He praised the project to digitise land records and said it should be completed everywhere.

Published in Dawn, February 10th, 2020