How much bribe does a land office need?

The stories of corruption at the land offices are, unfortunately, many. Just on Wednesday, the state minister for rural development and cooperatives, Swapan Bhattacharjee, revealed in a public meeting in Jashore how he could not get a piece of land registered because he had not paid a bribe to the local sub-registrar's office. Being a public official—he said in a video clip that has since gone viral—he had kept the story to himself for a week due to his embarrassment at the state of the land office's services.

Shockingly, though, he is not the first high-level government official to come out as a victim of misdeeds in the land offices. Earlier in June, two employees of Kushtia Sub-Registrar's Office demanded a bribe of Tk 30,000 from Deputy Attorney General (DAG) BM Abdur Rafel for preparing the deeds of his family land. Even after learning of his identity, the employees had the gall to offer him a concession of Tk 5,000 instead of withdrawing their corrupt offer. The DAG's brother had to pay Tk 10,000 to get the job done anyway, while one of the two land office employees was later suspended.

If this is the state of professionalism (or lack thereof) displayed by land office employees towards government officials, one can only wonder at the extent of their corruption when it comes to ordinary citizens. In fact, the arrests by the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) of Chakaria sub-registrar and another employee of the office in Cox's Bazar in April with Tk 642,100 of bribe money give us an inkling of just how much money these people are able to extort from the people, and how corruption goes on unabated in an environment of inaction—and even complicity—by those responsible.

A report by the Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) has found that people are made to pay bribes from Tk 500 to Tk 5 lakh at every step of the process of getting land-related services. One solution to this is to create a way for land disputes to be handled officially, and not informally through local arbitrators or land officers. The digitisation drive should also be expedited to make access to land services easier, and remove the scope for mid-level interventions. But most importantly, the government needs to make it a priority to take proper administrative and legal actions against corrupt employees at the land offices. These measures are long overdue, and can help create a culture of accountability and transparency at the land offices, so that people have hassle-free services.