The Challenge of Building State Capacity in the Land Administration in Rajasthan: Creating a Regulatory Administration in Land

Abstract

The quality of land markets and tenurial rights in land are significantly dependent on the quality of land administration. In most countries, governments provide services that can be defined as land administration including land record management, land valuation and tenure protection. In India the government has attempted to improve land administration by undertaking programmes to computerise land and title records. However, several administrative and structural issues with the land administration system are adversely affecting the quality of land administration, of which the computerisation process is one subset. This paper analyses the state capacity constraints and structural mis-alignments in the land administration of the state of Rajasthan and proposes a shift to a regulatory state. We build on our analysis to argue that a shift to a regulatory state is necessitated by the paucity of human capital in the land administration. This paper examines the efficacy of the separation of core services to be provided by the state and other services that can be provided by regulated, private service providers. In doing so, this paper proposes a structural shift in the design of the land administration in Rajasthan.