The Government is planning a comprehensive audit of the country‘s public and privately-held land assets. The public sector property audit will be conducted under the first phase of this initiative. The Ministry of Lands and Land Development will present a paper indicating modalities of a full audit of state and private land covering a wide spectrum of issues including updating of land records; survey, demarcation and protection of lands; efficient use of land; encroachment of land, the extent and reasons thereof, effectiveness of encroachment and removal actions.
The audit will also verify the use of lands on lease to institutions, according to a senior official of the Ministry of Lands and Land Development. He noted that the proposed land audit will go a long way in tightening Sri Lanka’s land management control system. State ownership of land is estimated to be around 80% of the total land area of 6,561,000 hectares. State land is under the management of different government departments, local authorities and statuary organizations.
The Ministry of Land and Land Development also implements a “Land Title Registration Programme” with the number of registrations completed up to August 2011 being 202,896. A Public Sector Property Audit is the practical solution available to the problem of identifying all state properties in the country, said A. Vedamulla, Head of the Institute of Real Estate and Valuation at a knowledge sharing conference on real property development in Colombo recently. This is an exercise to prepare an accurate and up-to-date database of state sector property assets. He pointed out that it is necessary to collect legal, physical and location attributes of all state assets including building and occupancy details and the availability of infrastructure and services. The identified properties need to be categorized into different categories based on the information available. Preparation of the public sector property data base is the first step in proper management of the property, he added. He revealed that private companies too hold fairly large extents of property assets. Information on the property assets of the private companies is not readily available. But according to the handbook of listed companies published by the Colombo Stock Exchange, Sri Lanka Telecom Ltd, Carson Cumberbach Co. Ltd, John Keells Holdings Ltd and Aitken Spence and Co. Ltd are some of the companies having a high percentage of fixed assets over total assets, Mr Vedamulla revealed.
The proposed land audit will go a long way in tightening the land management control system. The creation of an Institution of a Land Audit and Land Bank was one of the suggestions made by the World Bank during the United National Front regime in 2003. |
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