Landowners will not need to wade through mounds of paper at the Land Revenue Office (LRO) to get the details of their properties and taxes due once the land records go online after six months.

Property owners will be able to view the information from the comfort of their homes, and be saved a lot of frustration as the government has planned to implement a new automation system, the Land Records Information Management System (LRIMS), at 14 LROs across the country.

The Department of Land Reforms and Management (DoLRM) has been working to get the LRIMS up and running to make life easier for landowners by saving them from having to contend with a bewildering bureaucratic maze.

The government has started maintaining an online database at the LROs at Dilli Bazaar, Chabahil, Kalanki, Bhaktapur, Lalitpur, Baglung, Banke, Morang, Chitwan, Dhading, Kaski, Kavre, Makwanpur and Parsa and at the DoLRM under the LRIMS project.

“Our land records management system is slow. We are hopeful that this initiative will bring the overall land record management system into a specific process,” said Tej Raj Pandey, director general at the DoLRM. “The first phase of the initiative is being implemented at the LROs of metropolitan and sub-metropolitan cities where land transactions are higher.”

According to Pandey, the online system will be operated as a pilot project at the Bhaktapur LRO for around three months before being enforced at other LROs. “We will be going live perhaps by September,” Pandey said.

The system is being devised to automate land transaction related functions of the LROs on different land transaction process requirements and to make the information easily accessible to landowners and related authorities.

Likewise, according to Pandey, the online system will enable the department to increase scrutiny on the several issues including anomalies of government officials as well as middle men. “Several aspects like monitoring of capital gains tax and the land ceiling hasn’t been effectively enforced as it is hard to do so under the manual system,” said Pandey. “Once the system is implemented, the department can directly monitor such issues.”

The DoLRM is also mulling issuing integrated land ownership certificates once the system is formulated in all the places across the country. Integrated land ownership certificates will make it easier for the government to acquire information about land acquisition by individuals.

The government permits people in the Tarai region to own 11 bighas of land (10 bighas as property and 1 bigha for residential holdings), while the ceiling in the hilly parts of the country has been fixed at 75 ropanis (70 ropanis as property and 5 ropanis for residential holdings).   

In preparation for an online base, the DoLRM has started digitalization and migration of data to the online system at seven LROs across the country. At the same time, application design and development is going on. Likewise, hardware procurement and networking is likely to start next week. 

According to Shree Chandra Shah, director of the IT department at the DoLRM, data migration has started at all five LROs in the Kathmandu valley (Dilli Bazaar, Chabahil, Kalanki, Bhaktapur and Lalitpur) and in Birgunj and Chitwan.

“Almost 40 percent of the data migration task has been completed so far,” Shah said, adding that data migration and application development were the most crucial task. “Once, we are done with these tasks, other work will be completed.”

The DoLRM has planned to complete the data migration and digitalization process at all the LROs within three months. The main server will be installed at the DoLRM and the Government Integrated Data Centre (GIDC) situated at Singha Durbar.

The ICT development project has been funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB). An agreement worth US$ 1.365 million was signed between the DoLRM and RMSI, India on April 1, 2013. The Indian company is working with the DoLRM to implement the system.

According to Pandey, the ADB along  with World Bank is willing to  help the initiative in the days to come based on the outcome of current project.

source: the kathmandu post,15 feb 2014