Pb govt hires two consultancy firms to examine property papers

Two consultancy firms have been hired by Punjab government for examining property documents to know whether they were registered as per norms.
Punjab revenue minister Bikram Singh Majithia said, hiring of PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG was aimed at ensuring transparency in the revenue department.
"In case of any wrong doing, the official concerned would be held accountable," he said and informed that about 1.5 lakh property registrations would be scrutinised.
The department was exploring possibilities of automating revenue system to bring in more efficiency, he said, adding that the integrated Computerisation and Registration of Documents project (RoD) has already been started in Mohali, Jalandhar and Nakodar.

A new direct system of agri-loans was being introduced in which a farmer would directly get loan from the bank and authorities at the bank would write to the Revenue department to make entries about mortgaged properties in revenue records, the minister said.
Reiterating his commitment to weed out corruption from the revenue department, Majithia said ten naib tehsildars and five tehsildars have been suspended in the past one year, while three officers have been dismissed from service.
He further said, with operationalisation of 161 computerised fard (revenue record) kendras covering 12,683 villages out of 13,001 total villages of the state, landowners were now just a click away from their records.

These kendras have been providing 2.35 lakh fards (revenue records) per month on an average and the remaining six kendras would be set up soon at the six newly created sub-tehsils.