60,000 acres of Sindh govt land encroached upon, minister told

Meeting discusses performance and progress of revenue department

KARACHI: Provincial Minister for Revenue and Relief Makhdoom Mehboobuz Zaman chaired the maiden meeting of the Revenue Department in Karachi on Wednesday.

BoR Member Land Utilisation Abdul Wahab Soomro informed the meeting that around 60,000 acres of Sindh government's land has been illegally occupied by different departments and criminals. The revenue minister assured his full support to resolve the matter as soon as possible.



Board of Revenue senior member, Dr Iqbal Durrani briefed the minister regarding the performance and projects of the revenue department. He explained that the board was established in 1970 under the Board of Revenue Act 1957.

The existing land record system in Sindh comprises three isolated systems - land records held by the Mukhtiarkar of each of the 126 talukas or sub-divisions, maps held by the directorate of settlement survey and 104 sub-registrar offices.

The meeting was informed that all available land records of the 29 districts of the province maintained since 1985 had been computerised. This constitutes almost 95% of the existing records. The other 5% records pertain to unregistered Dehs and other missing records.

The central database is the largest Sindhi language database in the world and is linked with 27 districts of the province, excluding Sujjawal and Korangi. The database comprises over 15 million pages of records.



Durrani said that citizens can get land record of any district from the department's service centres within 15 minutes at a cost of Rs150. He added that the department has set up a call centre to address complaints and receive feedback from citizens. The helpline can be reached at 111-267-247 during office hours, five days a week.

The Sindh Revenue Department has also launched a website, www.sindhzameen.gos.pk, which provides free access to over four million land records. The website is visited by an average of one million users each year. Besides, the department has also launched an android mobile application for smart phone users to check land records online. The Sindh Zameen application has been downloaded by over 10,000 users and has a user rating of 4.3 out of 5.