Land transactions System

February 11 – ‘E-Succour’ in the near future will allow Bhutanese to make buy, sell and also inherit land at the click of a button online.

In the first step towards this, the national land commission (NLC) has installed a data centre or large computer memory in its building in Thimphu.

“We’ve already entered most of the information on individual thrams, digitised survey maps, cadastral survey maps and topography maps into the data centre,” said Dorjee Tshering, head of the survey department in NLC. The next step will be to ensure that this data is accessible to gewogs and dzongkhags online.

“What should eventually happen is that a villager only needs to make an application to his gewog office, after which everything will be done online for him, from checking details, approving the transaction and also giving the lagthrams online,” said Dorjee. The gewog and dzongkhag offices would be able to access the data centre and get all verifications and processes done online.

Part of this programme, he said, was also to streamline regulations and so current rules, like the mandatory one month wait for a land transaction, would be done away and reduced to just a week.

In the current system, people have to apply to the gup, who must manually verify it, after which it is sent to the dzongkhag, where land officials again do the verification before sending it to Thimphu for final verification and approval. The whole process takes a minimum of a month to few months and the applicant ends up travelling to the dzongkhag headquarter and the capital to follow up.

The data centre was set up in October 2009 and has five dedicated staff. It currently has six servers, which will be upgraded to twelve.

The online systems will be installed with software programs like land registration software, land mapping software and surveying software to help catalogue the information, locate it and use it. The system will also be accessible to financial institutions as the main item of mortgage is land. “This will help both FIs and ordinary people avoid fraud, like double mortgage, and financial transaction on land will also be easier and transparent,” said Dorjee.

“The data centre will also be useful to the government for planning, information and statistics, since we plan to link it up with other information centres like immigration, revenue and customs,’ said Dorjee.

According to Tshering Penjore, the system will have a trial run in Lheuntse or urban Thimphu in 2011, after which it could be introduced in stages across the country, in keeping with the new cadastral resurvey information.

source: kuensel