ENTERING this section of the Sindh Board of Revenue (BoR) department is a pleasant surprise. Unlike the usual bureaucratic environment, here a corporate outlook seems to prevail. This is one of the BoR’s People’s Service Centres, located just paces away from the BoR secretariat in the Shahbaz Building, where land and property owners can get access to their records.

Form 2, Form 7A and Form 7B, which show the ownership of land and property across Sindh, are accessible here on the production of the owner’s computerised identity card. The applicant is issued with a token upon entry into the office, and then waits for his or her turn to appear before the official concerned to input details into the digitised information system. Eventually the document, printed on paper that has security features, is given to the applicant upon payment of a modest fee. And the fee, too, wasn’t charged until recently, till the project was officially launched. This is the Land Administration & Revenue Management Information System introduced by the Sindh BoR a few days ago.

“We are hopefully on the path to have a paperless system of documentation by June 2017,” says Zulfikar Shah, a BoR member.

Land revenue documentation has, because of official lethargy, always been a tedious process. It seems, though, that some beginning has been made to streamline it. Those associated with the farming sector have always felt they are at a disadvantage because of indifference on the part of revenue officers such as mukhtiarkars and tapedars who, they believe, deny them their own records they need to obtain agricultural credit and gain access to government farm development schemes.

Historically, Sindh has remained resentful against disparities in the disbursement of farm credit (which is regulated by the State Bank of Pakistan) as its share amounts to 12 per cent or a little over. This is mainly due to the limited availability of farmers’ passbooks, and a lack of coordination with the revenue department that hinders the verification of these books.

The exercise is “for the time being for the keeping of records,” says Advocate Ramiz Bukhari as he waits for his turn to get Form 2, which he had lost. “We can’t use it for sale and purchase as the document [issued here] has no legal value. The sale certificate is given to us only when the ‘unofficial’ fee is paid otherwise we are driven from pillar to post.”

Twenty-six People’s Service Centres are ready across Sindh, one in each district. The provincial excise tax department has also set up a counter to receive the motor vehicles tax through a one-window operation. The number of visitors is bound to increase, which may require the authorities to raise the number of data-processing assistants or assistant managers. “There are hiccups in the system which may add up when the workload increases,” admits one officer, referring to, for example, internet speed issues.

This project has been executed by the Sindh government at a cost of Rs4.9 billion. Apart from the issuance of records, also under way is the reconstruction of rights records that were burnt in arson attacks after the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in Dec 2007. Currently, four million entries of land records are available online through a centralised system. Five million registration documents — sales deeds, for example — are available on microfilm in sub-registrars’ offices across Sindh. These are to be computerised through a programme supervised by the National Database and Registration Authority.

Zulfikar Shah, the BoR member, claims that an e-stamp will be issued from authorised banks to any individual who will no longer be required to purchase the separate stamps/tickets that are used for several types of transactions. He adds that this record, which pertains mainly to transactions regarding residential and commercial properties, will be available online. Documents obtained from the centre are to be valid for subsequent transactions.

“We have written to the State Bank to direct commercial banks to accept the automated forms to extend credit to farmers,” says Shah. “It’s for the SBP to handle it. If banks need verification, they should just send it to us.”

A farmers’ leader, Mahmood Nawaz Shah, remains unimpressed though. “The computerised document has no legal value,” he points out. “Banks will not provide loans to farmers on its basis until some mechanism is worked out with the SBP’s intervention. Further, only 80pc of the record is computerised and just 50pc is error free.”

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2016