Editorial
An eye for the obvious
Finance minister's move should be carried forward
WE are heartened to learn that the government is going to reduce land registration and other related fees and, more importantly, unify the hitherto disparate fee collection mechanism. These have been public interest issues that although live and burning had customarily failed to receive attention of governments given to other remote-to-people agenda.
Finance Minister AMA Muhith told an inter-ministerial meeting that the government considers the present land registration fee as prohibitive and spawning corruption. When transacting deal for a land valued at Tk one crore the parties have to pay a levy of Tk 18 lakh, so what happens is the plot gets grossly undervalued to evade tax.
The fee payment would also be eased up by replacing the four separate offices to which the sellers and buyers have to run now by a single point of collection. Now the registration fee, tax at source, transfer fee and local fee would be payable under the same roof.
Whether as a result of the reduced fees alone dishonesty will disappear from the scene is, however, open to question. That is exactly the reason why we would like to go back to our occasional remarks through this column recommending computerisation of land documentation processes encompassing buying and selling, transfer, mutation and all other land-related transactions to address corruption and malpractice on a broad spectrum. Computerisation will mean a unified record keeping system as an anti-dote to fraudulent ownership rights that original land owners often bump into.
Actually, land registration and documentation processes are pivotal not just to ownership rights but also to land use. But ironically these are mired in such a primitive state in our country that we ought to be sorely ashamed of it.
We would be happy if the finance minister and the minister for land build up on the modest but a significant step that the former has initiated. Real estate and housing sector is regarded as a literal building block of economic progress in today's world. But this finds an impediment in our country, as does land acquisition for many a development project that is botched up because of conflicting land-centred claims and complicated procedures of registration or documentation. Many deals are talked of but they stop short of maturing into a signing up stage as they fall through the cracks of the system. For various reasons, therefore, we advocate modernisation of land registration.
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