How Easy Is Land Registration Across The World?

In developing countries like India, property titles are often not clear. Hence, it is difficult to say who owns what.

According to the UN-Habitat, more than 70 per cent of the land in developing countries is not registered. This is a process which happened long ago in western capitalist democracies. Things have not changed too much in developing countries.

There are, of course, reasons. Getting clear property titles is expensive, like most such procedures. The process is risky, because you may lose right to a property that you are already using because there is more ambiguity than necessary in such matters. In most cases, in a conflict between people who use the property and people who own records to the property, neither are likely to win. The land registration system is not very efficient, and it is not always easy to establish the owner of an asset. For these reasons, even when it is almost impossible to develop a property without clear property titles, most people think it is better to hold on to the asset than do something about this.

This has consequences. It is difficult to develop individual plots and in turn,  develop entire neighbourhoods without knowing who owns what. It is not easy for a developing country to turn around its fate when nearly three-fourth of the people do not have formal property records. This is one of the greatest challenges which India faces. This will be one of the biggest barriers to the government's mission to house everybody and to build smart cities across the country.

In western capitalist democracies, the land registration system relies on databases which have all properties of assets including size, land use regulations, mortgages, taxes, other restrictions and the value of the land. This is yet to happen in India and other developing countries. The land registration system isn't up to the mark.

As the law, land registration system and titling are not yet evolved, people rely on informal norms. Even in cities of developing countries, about two-third of the land remains unregistered. This is surprising because urban land in cities is very valuable, even in developing countries. When compared to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development  (OECD) countries, land registration takes three times as much in South Asia, East Asia, Latin America and Pacific Nations. In other words, you can get land registered three times as faster in OECD countries. It is not surprising that much of the land remains unregistered in poor countries.

According to The World Bank, in OECD countries, it took about 24 days to register a piece of property in 2014. In South Asia, this took 99 days. This is four times as much times as it takes in an OECD country. At 81 days, East Asia and Pacific do not fare much better either. In Latin America and Carribean, it takes 65 days. If this seems better, in Sub-Saharan Africa, it takes less times. In Middle East and North Africa, it takes about 33 days. In Europe and Central Asia, it takes only 27 days.

The process seems to be unusually slow in most parts of the world, but the performance of South Asia is bad, even when compared to less developed countries. This is partly because the transfer of land happened in many different ways in South Asia, while this is not true of many African countries where land changes hands in traditional ways. Moreover, the land registration process is more simple in many African countries.

Giving property titles to everybody is not a solution to all problems as some economists claim. In many developing countries, this has led to many problems because farmers and other low income households were slow to adapt to the concept of private property. They sold land for small amounts of money because they were not financially savvy. But this is not a reason to not make sure that a better land registration system is in place.