LAHORE: The matter of problems in the purchase and sale of land came under discussion in a session of the Punjab Assembly, following which the Punjab government suspended the Green Certificate for six months.
Mujtaba Shuja-ur-Rehman announced in the House that the Green Certificate has been suspended for six months after problems came to light with it.
Opposition leader Rana Aftab Ahmed said the greatest corruption is occurring in the Land Department for the issuance of the fard, and that for the purchase and sale of land, the patwari system was better than the Green Certificate.
Rana Aftab Ahmed said the matter of records in the purchase and sale of land does not operate as a one-window arrangement.
The fard — the extract from the record of rights showing ownership and encumbrances on a parcel of land — is the foundational document in any land transaction in Punjab. Its issuance is the point at which most citizens first encounter the land revenue administration, and complaints of gatekeeping at this stage have a long history that predates any of the recent reform efforts.
Raja Shaukat Bhatti said the problems concerning land transactions are so extensive that in two acres of land, the names of several people are included.
Fractional and multiply-recorded ownership on small holdings is a chronic feature of Punjab’s land record. Successive generations of inheritance divide a parcel among heirs without physical partition, producing records in which numerous individuals hold undivided shares in a single plot. Any transaction on such land requires the concurrence of all recorded shareholders, and disputes over the extent of individual shares are a principal source of civil litigation in the province.
Amjad Ali Javed said that in a meeting with the Senior Member Board of Revenue, he had made clear that problems would emerge from the Green Certificate.
The Speaker of the Punjab Assembly said that if the Green Certificate was passed by the Assembly, then the authority to suspend it should also rest with the Assembly. If the Green Certificate has been suspended for six months, then under which law this was done is precisely what needs to be established.
The Speaker’s observation raises a constitutional question of some weight. Where a measure derives its legal force from an act of the legislature, the executive’s power to suspend its operation by administrative decision is not automatic; it depends on whether the parent statute contains a delegating provision permitting suspension, and on the terms of any such provision.
Raja Shaukat Bhatti said that land records from 2020 to 2026 have still not been computerised.
The Punjab Land Records Authority has, over more than a decade, digitised historical land records and established service centres intended to replace the traditional patwari-mediated process for obtaining a fard and registering transfers. The gap identified in the Assembly — a six-year period of records not yet entered into the system — undermines the reliability of the digital record precisely for the most recent and therefore most operationally relevant transactions.
Where the digital record is incomplete, citizens and officials must revert to manual records for the missing period, reintroducing the discretion and delay that computerisation was designed to eliminate.
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