Issues around Management of Public Land Holdings
India’s public land holdings are enormous and forms one of government’s most significant tangible assets. A study conducted by the India Development Foundation in 2013 found that India’s public land holdings are very large and remain potentially under-utilised. Time and again, it has been argued that India needs to manage its public land holdings with more diligence.
Estimates
Currently, the defence ministry (MoD) is India’s largest landowner. According to an estimate, it alone owns over 7,00,000 acres of land, of which about 10% is in prime urban areas. Apart from MoD, railways, central paramilitary forces, postal department, road transport ministry, sports authority, civil aviation ministry, ports and central PSUs etc. have huge public land holdings. For instance, the 13 major port trusts of the country collectively own around 100,000 hectares of land and the Airports Authority of India (AAI) controls over 20,400 hectares of high-value land in and around major airports in the country. Similarly, the Indian Railways owns 43,000 hectares of land and India Post has nearly 1,900 vacant plots of prime real estate in metro cities.
Issues and Analysis
For your examination, this issue has to be analyzed in the light of below questions.
- Why public land management is necessary?
- What are the major hurdles in valuing of India’s public lands?
- What is the way forward?
Why public land management is necessary?
Though, the government has huge number of public holdings, there is no inventory for all the land owned by the government. These vast resources are worth a great deal. Indian Railways has identified 43,000 hectares of its holdings as unnecessary. Similarly, the Central PSUs has some 95 lakh hectares of surplus land. Proper inventory of government lands are primarily necessary for three reasons. First, disposing of surplus lands could free up fiscal resources for investments in other needy areas. Usually, when such transactions take place, the value is very high. For instance, when the Metropolitan Mumbai Regional Development Authority (MMRDA) leased its 13 hectares of land in the Bandra Kurla Complex, the transacted value was five thousand crore, which is, roughly 10 times the MMRDA annual infrastructure budget and 5 times the Mumbai Municipal Corporation budget. Second, to save government lands from encroachments, inventory is required. Besides making loss, encroachments tend to unnecessarily burden courts with litigations. Third, to monitor the land use efficiency in the lands owned or leased by the government, inventory is necessary.
What are the major hurdles in valuing of India’s public lands?
The three major reasons are:
- Lack of publicly available information on public land holdings
- Incomplete information on existing leasing transactions.
- Public land transactions being privately negotiated rather than being conducted on an open and competitive basis.
What is the way forward?
International experience
The problem of public land management is not only unique to India. It has been successfully addressed in many countries with a strong federal structure as of India. International experience suggests that setting up a committee of secretaries or administrative officials would be counter-productive. Instead, the public land management must be assigned to specialised agencies with a definite mandate and indicators for performance evaluation.
Comprehensive inventory
A comprehensive inventory of public land should be carried out by recording parameters like location, dimensions, legal title, restrictions of development (if any), current and future planned use etc. This type of inventory must be carried out on all lands owned by all agencies of the government. Consistency and comprehensiveness must be given more importance in such inventories.
Accountability
Once the inventory is complete, the data collected must be made publicly accessible to infuse an essential element of accountability.
Incentives
After the completion of the inventory, a centralised process must be carried out for identifying surplus public land. Financial and administrative incentives must be offered for the sound asset management practices adopted by the government agencies in managing those lands.
Disposition of surplus land
The government agencies possessing surplus land must be asked to justify the necessity of holding any parcel of land. Public lands having no efficient use can be rented, leased or sold at a full market value. The objective is to divest all those holdings that are not cost-effective for service provision. The fiscal resources generated by this action can be invested elsewhere to create productive assets which will be beneficial to the society. The goal here should be to divest those properties that are not cost-effective for service provision.
MoD’s example
Indian Defence Estate Services (IDES) has digitised, indexed and computerised land records with surveys, demarcation and verification, and a systematic land audit for all the land holdings of MoD.
Fact Box: Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme
The Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme (DILRMP) was launched by the government in 2008 with an objective to develop a modern, comprehensive and transparent land records management system in the country. The major components of the programme are Computerization of land record, Survey/re-survey, Computerization of Registration, automated and automatic mutation, integration between textual and spatial records, inter-connectivity between revenue and registration, development of core Geospatial Information System (GIS) and capacity building.
This can be replicated by all other government agencies. Even, the government can rope in IDES to carry out the same exercise for all other government agencies.
