PAKISTAN is a country where land provides not just a source of livelihood in an agricultural economy but is also considered a family`s most solid asset. Yet for decades, the records of possession and establishing ownership have been governed by archaic and inconvenient colonial-era systems, hinged at the most basic level on the office of the patwari, or the keeper of (manual) records. As a group, patwaris are as notorious for the latha on which they record land details as they are for their tendency to indulge in corruption and extortion. This background is key to understanding the significance of the step taken over recent years in computerising land records province by province. Once the process is complete, the number of people that the exercise will benefit will be very high. An advertising campaign currently being run by the Sindh Board of Revenue, for example, concerns the launching of a computerised land record facility. It refers to 4.5 million entries of land records, seven million landowners, and 27 service centres in each district headquarters. It boasts of being able to issue for a small fee the required record on paper that has security features, through a database integrated with that of Nadra, the national database authority. A similar project was initiated in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as far back as 2013, and the initial entries have more or less been completed. Punjab too recently completed the first steps of the process, and the Land Records Management Information System has been up and running for a while. Only in Balochistan, it seems, has little progress been made on this front.

People using these facilities have reported some glitches, such as inconsistencies over demarcations, overlaps in titles etc. These, however, were only to be expected and, in fact, throw into starker focus the very need for the project of computerisation in the first place. The first step to controlling chaos is to put records down in a manner that can be crossreferenced; over time, as people report errors and inconsistencies, the record will eventually be straightened out and the process simplified much as the functioning of Nadra has been smoothened over the years.

The provincial governments that have undertaken the effort deserve commendation, holding out the hope as they are of a time when the patwari becomes a relic of the past and when obtaining land records is no longer a prohibitively difficult process.