Expediting the land registration process in Sri Lanka
‘Mea culpa’ – there was a soul searching self-confession by powerful government departments on the delay of getting any land registered. To expedite this process and to work on it the government has set up a ‘Registering Property Task Force’.
To explain as to how the Task Force involved and set about their task and get their findings across to the public knowledge, a media briefing was organized by the Ministry of Development Strategies and International Trade, on Monday at Galadari Hotel, Colombo.
The major state agency involved in this process of registering properties is the Surveyor General’s Department and the Task Force (TF) is headed by P.M.P.
Udayakantha, Surveyor General and the TF consisted of the representatives of the Surveyor General’s Department, Registrar General’s Department, Colombo Municipal Council, WP Revenue Department, Valuation Department, and ICTA Agency of Sri Lanka.
Acknowledging the lackadaisical and inefficient way state agencies deal with property registration, Mr. Udayakantha said: “Sri Lanka is not good as even though we are at 111 in the ranking of doing business in all the activities out of 193 countries; in the case of registering property in 2018 we are ranked as low as at 157 and that means under registration of property activity it is rather weak.”
He said that the easiest country doing business and which ranked number one is New Zealand, but noted that in Sri Lanka it is very difficult to do business though the government is keen to improve the situation to make Sri Lanka a good country to do business.
He said that there are nine processes to be fulfilled and to get these attended by various state agencies it takes as long as 51 days and he agreed that it is a very lengthy process. The World Bank, he indicated prepares a report on doing business each year, evaluating the situation on each country deciding on how good a country to do business making a list and ranking. This would, he said, help encourage the investors and added that Sri Lanka has to improve the aspects involved.
He went on to explain various hassles involved in the process and to clear the nine processes involved. The TF, he said, goes through the whole situation, evaluates and finds remedial action to improve the status of registering property. In the Task Force what they are envisaging is to digitalize the processes with IT. When registering, he said, 5.1 per cent of the value of the property has also to be spent.
Initially, the TF goes through the manual process to identify the shortcomings to cut down and improve the time and thereby was able to achieve a number of milestones in the improvements and work on a broader concept. The 51 days, he indicated, is now brought down to 26 days. He said that by the end of the year it is planned to bring it down to five days and probably to have a single window rather than one to shuttle from one agency to another and said they strived hard to bring it further down to a mere two days.
Making the opening remarks, Wasantha Deshapriya, Secretary to the Ministry of Telecommunications and Digital Infrastructure and Foreign Employment said that in the e-Government rankings by the UN Sri Lanka is 73 out of 193 countries in 2017 and improvements have to be worked while examining as to why the country cannot further improve in the rankings. Only better ranking, he said is in the e-Servicing where Sri Lanka ranked 33 out of 193 countries – a remarkable achievement.
He pointed out that the state agencies have been very selfish and do not want to collaborate while they required another mechanism to sit at organizational level and coordinate among them, which they now lack – a high level direct body to coordinate and a group of committed officials ‘to get the things done.’ The necessity he said is the digital transformation.