Attempts at registration
There have been some case studies of efforts to formally protect property
rights. In the early 1990s the Indian Ministry of Rural Development launched
a major initiative to register and computerize land records in 582 of the 600 or
so districts in the country. It was not intended to correct mistakes in existing
records, merely to register and store them. A review by the World Bank (2007)
found, first, that it had simplified the system and significantly reduced the
petty corruption traditionally involved in getting access to land records;
second, better record-keeping improved the quality of government services to
small farmers; and, third, computerization had created documents of legal
ownership (collateral) which helped landowners get access to credit. Other
studies have highlighted the striking diversity in the impact of the scheme. The
state of Bihar lacked the capacity to implement the scheme and only 6,081 of
45,099 villages were entered (Saxena, 2005). In the state of Karnataka, by
contrast, 20 million records of land held by 6.7 million farmers were comput-
erized. The provision of land records by a village accountant in Karnataka had
previously taken between three and 30 days and required a significant bribe.
The request for land records at a rural IT booth after the registration effort took
between fiv e and 30 minutes and cost a minimal fixed charge. A study of the
Gulbarga district of Karnataka showed there to be widespread awareness of
this computerization process and a large number of those interviewed had
obtained a copy of computerized information. Nearly 70 per cent of those
doing so obtained their records in less than 5 minutes, for 44 per cent no bribes
had been necessary, and 63 per cent of those interviewed found it easier to
obtain a loan as a result (Ahuja and Singh,2006).
Establishing property rights is in theory key to economic growth as it should
facilitate the re-allocation of property rights through the market to those better
able to use the assets efficiently. The Karnataka project gave easier access to
credit, hence the ability to invest in one’s own land, but there was no evidence
that land transfers had been made any easier. In Karnataka even after registra-
tion the services of the village accountant were still needed to inspect land
sales before registration changes, the process could take up to two years to
complete, involved substantial bribes and there was little evidence of any
progress in reducing conflicts over land ownership (Saxena, 2005; Ahuja and
Singh, 2006).
In Sub-Saharan Africa ambitious donor-funded land registration projects
date back to the 1950s but only 1 per cent of land is currently registered under
formal property rights. Easterly (2008:97) describes property access and rights
among the Luo tribe of western Kenya as:
a complicated maze of swapping plots between kin and seasonal exchanges
of land for labour and livestock. Each household claims to land included
many plots of different soils and terrains, on which many different crops
grew [which was a] good system to diversify risk in an uncertain climate.Institutions 219