Impact Evaluation of the Land Record Management Information System in the Punjab Province, Pakistan

Complexity in administration and limited accessibility to land records have been long- standing issues in developing countries. In Pakistan, except for the province of Punjab where land-record has been computerized in 2017, the land record is largely administered through traditional land registers and cadastral maps in paper formats requiring a laborious work of administrators called “Patwaris” at the grass-root level. As an important step towards e- governance, the Punjab provincial government established a Land Record Management Information System (PLRMIS) in 2013 that simplified the procedure of land registration and transfer through digitization of land records. We evaluated the impact of the PLRMIS on dispute resolution efforts in the Punjab province through the Joint Research Project of the KDI School of Public Policy, South Korea in collaboration with the Department of Management Sciences, COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI), Attock Campus, Pakistan. We adopted a quasi-experimental approach to scientifically examine the impact of PLRMIS on land-related dispute resolution and identify key issues associated with governance of this large-scale program through a field survey. Our empirical findings provide suggestive evidence of the direct effects of the program on the number of disputes registered in Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR) centres across Punjab. Our results show that on average, an ADR Centre located in the early treated district is likely to receive 40 cases more than ADR centres located in early controlled districts. We also adopt a two-stage least square approach where the program effect is instrumented to estimate effect on the number of successfully resolved disputes. Our results are robust despite controlling for covariates and entity-specific variation as well as time-trend.Our primary data collected through field surveys from four major stakeholders support the idea of increasing access to land records and related information through PLRMIS despite challenges in the implementation and operations of the program. We find significant variation in the level of use, understanding of citizens regarding access of the system and the extent to which clients are served with the PLRMIS. Very importantly, we observe that majority of those people who have conducted a land related transactions and having conflicts in those transactions, resort to the PLRMIS online facilities located in each tehsil of the districts. Our field surveys also identified key areas of the PLRMIS that need attention of government officials in order to sustainably continue this flagship program already in place across Punjab