State land and property valuation undergoes system change
All state machinery is now set to undergo a system change removing bottlenecks and streamlining outdated public administration and ages-old official procedures with the aim of promoting foreign direct investment (FDI), the Ministry of Finance announced.
Sri Lanka will relax official restrictions in releasing land and property for foreign investment projects expediting valuation and other relevant procedures towards achieving the target of US$ 2.5-3 billion in FDI this year.
According to State Minister for Finance Ajith Nivard Cabraal, several commitments are already being made and around a billion dollars’ worth of investments were in the pipeline for the Colombo Port City.
He said Sri Lanka was working on providing stable macro-fundamentals to investors with the aim of promoting itself as a hub for FDI in South Asia.
Functions of the Valuation Department will be streamlined to expedite the issuance of state-owned land and property assessment reports when releasing it to various investment projects on the directions of Prime Minister and Finance Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa.
He has issued instructions to Valuation Department senior officials to explore the possibility of levying a reasonable fee in providing assessment reports to state institutions for investment project several times, a senior Treasury official said.
The request for assessment reports will have to be made to obtain land and property valuation for an investment project several times as and when such reports are required, senior officials informed the Prime Minister at a meeting on Monday.
The Valuation Department affiliated to the Finance Ministry has been directed to improve its productivity increasing the quality or value of output from the available resources.
The responsibility of preparing valuation report on state-owned land and property for investment project should not be given to private firms or private assessors even if there is a shortage of staff, the Prime Minister has said.
He directed relevant high officials to fill the vacancies in the department as soon as possible.
The government owns approximately 80 per cent of the land in Sri Lanka, including forest reserves, forest land and the land housing most tea, rubber, and coconut plantations, which are leased out, normally on 50-year lease terms.
Forcible clearance of forest land for development and mega agriculture land without any valuation report or land clearance permit has become a frequent occurrence in the past one and half years amidst protests of environmentalists and villagers.
Sri Lankan authorities have recently transferred the guardianship of forests lying outside protected areas to local administrators, with a view to increasing the island’s agriculture industry productivity, several environmentalists said.
Multinationals and local companies are to be given state lands for mega agriculture projects with tax concessions thrown in under a controversial deal involving forest lands, which unlike forest reserves, are not protected.
The government is planning to hand over thousands of acres of forest lands to five multinational companies after abolishing the circular no. 5/2001 limiting arbitrary allocation of ‘other’ (unreserved) forest lands, environmentalists and local communities say.
According to the circular, any allocation of forest lands for development activities requires the approval of a special review board which has not been followed since the circular is invalid.