It says the previous attempts at land reform have failed and there is scepticism about this and other attempts to reform land administration in Pakistan. The reasons for these unsuccessful efforts were various but the key failures to date have been due to little or no active involvement by stakeholders through a steering committee.
Efforts were more IT focused and did not adequately consider the challenges related to people, data (data cleansing and data quality) and processes. The report further said the element of human resistance was severely underestimated in particular misjudgement of the Tapedar (Patwari) role and their current power on land issues.
It urges the Sindh government to ensure the legal status of computerised records at the onset of the project and added the security measures should also be taken to prevent records'' tampering and its unauthorised access. "Once the computerised system is in place, system generated documents (based on biometric verification) should be sufficient, which would eliminate human role (Patwari, Mukhtiarkar, Tapedar or any other government official) in the process".
"But if the authority concerned failed to comply with this recommendation, the things would bring back to square-one". It says the computerisation of land records is important and necessary to portray a new vision for the role of land administration management in Sindh, adding the Board of Revenue (BOR) has to take measures for the active involvement of all stakeholders to make the process transparent and successful.
Furthermore, it says the pace of implementing the recommendations is less than expectation, which should be increased for the development of much needed solid organisational structure to establish a liaison with all stakeholders. The ADB report appraises the critical need is to build the capacity to design, implement and sustain the reforms as the BOR does not have that capacity at the moment.
The FINCON Team has presented a broad view of the reforms necessary to modernise the operations of the land administration system in Sindh for the improvement of the current BOR operations. This plan offers a more realistic time frame for the reform program and is based on implementing a simplified and effective management structure which refocuses of the reform to be securing ownership rights rather than revenue generation.