RAWALPINDI: Taking notice of the slow pace of work on computerisation of land revenue record in six districts of Rawalpindi division, Commissioner Saqib Manan has set a deadline of Dec 31 to complete the task.

So far Rawalpindi district has computerised only 84pc of the record of mouzas (villages) while Talagang is on the top of the list with digitisation of 96.84pc record.

Attock district has digitised 93pc of its manual record of mouzas, Chakwal, 91.38pc and Jhelum 91pc. There are 455 mouzas in Attock and the record of 421 has been computerised. Out of the total 360 mouzas in Chakwal, 329 are computerised while there are 95 mouzas in Talagang and the record of 92 has been computerised. Jhelum has 595 mouzas out of which 544 are computerised while Rawalpindi has 1,183 mouzas and only 998 are computerised.

In digitisation of Girdawari (crop inspection record), Rawalpindi district also lags behind. Attock and Jhelum have completed 100pc digitisation of Girdawari record, Chakwal 94pc, Talagang 87.5pc while Rawalpindi has completed only 51pc of the record.

Talagang tops list with maximum computerised record

A senior district administration official said the speed of digitisation in the district was slow as mouzas where housing societies were being developed had mostly not been computerised.

He said the percentage of computerisation of the record in Rawalpindi would further reduce as Murree and Kotli Sattian had been separated from the district.

On the other hand, the Murree district administration claimed that they had computerised the record of 107 of the total 134 mouzas.

A senior official of the land revenue department told Dawn that the commissioner had asked the revenue officials to expedite work.

He said the deputy commissioners had been asked to conduct public hearing of cases twice a week to meet the deadline.

However, he said the computerisation of record would take three to four months.

The facility of hearing cases through video link has also been provided to avoid any unnecessary delay in resolving cases.

He said 366 rural revenue offices and 818 patwar circles were operational across the division.

The official said computerisation of manual records of mouzas was in progress and so far 2,384 out of 2,655 had been completed.

He said there was a shortage of staff as over 100 posts of patwaris were vacant in the division.

Deputy Commissioner Shoaib Ali was not available for comments despite repeated attempts.

However, a senior official of the district administration said the government wanted to bring changes to the land revenue record so people would not

suffer and waste their time to visit offices of the revenue officials.

He said Punjab Board of Revenue Member Akhtar Zaman visited Rawalpindi last month and informed the administration about the new plan and asked the officials to complete the process as soon as possible.

Published in Dawn, December 14th, 2022