KARACHI: The Sindh Board of Revenue (BoR), taking a lead in computerising revenue record in the country, has covered all the 29 districts of the province with over 15 million pages in its data.

Through this system, which will become functional formally on Monday when Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah will inaugurate it at Hyderabad, people will be rid of the Patwari system.

The computerisation of revenue record has revealed that in the province 78 per cent are small farmers, who own less than four acres, 16 per cent possess four to 16 acres and six per cent with 16 to 100 acres while the biggest land owners possessing over 100 acres are 0.34 per cent.

This was stated by Senior Member of Board of Revenue Rizwan Memon while giving a presentation to the chief minister on computerisation of the revenue record here at CM House on Tuesday.

The presentation was attended by chief secretary Siddique Memon, secretary to CM Iqbal Durrani, BoR member Zulfikar Shah and others revenue officers concerned.

Highlighting details of the record, the senior member said the revenue record of 29 districts comprising over 15 million pages had 90 per cent been completed by nine data entry firms by scanning documents and making their index.

The inherent flaws with the revenue record were also rectified by adopting a proper procedure, Zulfikar Shah said.

Giving examples of the flaws, he said that 35 per cent flaws were found in the division of shares; 30 per cent record had missing survey numbers; three per cent errors of calculation; one per cent record lacked entries of sellers and buyers and two per cent entries were made without attestation.

The chief minister recalled that the record of about 850 dehs was burnt just after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

“What have you done to retrieve that record,” The CM asked the senior member Rizwan Memon who replied that a large portion of that record had been traced out from microfilming units.

“We have retrieved and computerised the record of 400 dehs and still working on tracing the record of the remaining 450 dehs,” he said.

BoR member Zulfikar Shah said that major forms which had been computerised were village Form-1 meant for registered lands; Village Form-II meant for register of land used/granted or assigned for non-agricultural purposes, Village Form VII Part-A, which is record of rights of agricultural lands; Village Form VII Part-B meant for mutation register and Property Register (it is maintained in Karachi showing details of land separately held from government and municipality and Property Card which is maintained in all city survey areas except Karachi in place of property register).

He said that with computerisation of revenue record a very interesting data had been collected that showed that 78 per cent were small farmers who owned less than four acres.

Replying to a question of the chief minister, the BoR member said that 76 per cent of land was owned by males and nine per cent was owned by females while 15 per cent land was owned by members of the family jointly.

He said that for the first time in Pakistan mobile application ‘Sindh Zameen’ had been launched through which land record could be accessed. More than 80,000 people had utilised this facility, he added.

Mr Shah said that they had established 27 service centres, of them 25 had been functionalised in the district headquarters and the remaining four would be made operational by the end of this month (April, 2016).

Talking about the facilities available at the services centre, Zulfikar Shah said that the copy of land record could be obtained from any service centre through modern central database.

“A specialised security based paper with multiple security features and QR code has been used to prevent forgery.”

Talking about a data centre at Karachi, he said that it had been established storing largest Sindhi language database in the world with seven Tera Bytes (TB) data comprising more than 15 million pages of land record. “We have 108 qualified IT staff for all 27 service centres,” he said.

He said that conversion of microfilmed data of 75 million pages into digital data was under way which would be available online by the end of 2016.

The BoR member said that digital maps of 93 dehs of Karachi division and maps of remaining districts of the province had been linked with the land record database.

The chief minister directed the Board of Revenue to make their call centre functional to address errors, if any. “You must have a feedback system to rectify errors and mistakes, if any,” he said.

Published in Dawn, April 6th, 2016