CHARLES KONG SOO

Min­is­ter of Agri­cul­ture, Land, and Fish­eries Clarence Ramb­harat says digi­tis­ing the 120,000 state land ten­ants' thick, old pa­per files in­to the Elec­tron­ic Doc­u­ment Man­age­ment Sys­tem (Land Card) will mean faster ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion in min­utes in­stead of the months that pa­per files take to reach him.

He de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress dur­ing the launch of the sys­tem at the min­istry's cor­po­rate head­quar­ters in Ch­agua­nas, where 100 state land ten­ants re­ceived their elec­tron­ic land cards on Fri­day.

The land card will en­able state land ten­ants of agri­cul­tur­al, res­i­den­tial, and com­mer­cial parcels, to con­duct trans­ac­tions with the Min­istry's Land Man­age­ment Di­vi­sion in a more ef­fec­tive man­ner as the sys­tem caters for the op­ti­mal use of re­sources, time ef­fi­cien­cy, and qual­i­ty ser­vice de­liv­ery.

Hold­ing aloft a thick, pa­per file of a state land­hold­er dat­ing back to 1956 writ­ten in foun­tain pen, parch­ment pa­per, type­writer pa­per, and com­put­erised pages, Ramb­harat said, “This tells the sto­ry of just one par­cel of land. We es­ti­mate that there are ap­prox­i­mate­ly 120,000 parcels of state land which cov­ers agri­cul­tur­al, res­i­den­tial, com­mer­cial, in­sti­tu­tion­al, gas and util­i­ty cor­ri­dors and for­est re­serves to deal with.

“If this file goes miss­ing, it's big trou­ble. I am still try­ing to lo­cate 542 files that I have to work with from De­cem­ber 2017 to the present. We've been able to digi­tise over 1,800 agri­cul­tur­al files so far.

“The card saves hav­ing to deal with pa­per, it re­moves the risk of a file dis­ap­pear­ing and de­lays, gives every­one an op­por­tu­ni­ty to deal with in­for­ma­tion in re­al time as it took some­time two months for files to reach me.

“The card takes ex­act­ly what you use on mes­sen­ger, the abil­i­ty to ac­cess and up­load doc­u­ments and have a con­ver­sa­tion tak­ing it to a dif­fer­ent lev­el.”

The min­istry's Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary Ly­dia Ja­cobs said the land card will en­able the min­istry's Land Man­age­ment Di­vi­sion to ac­cess its com­pre­hen­sive dig­i­tal in­ven­to­ry of all state lands and re­trieve land in­for­ma­tion in min­utes as op­posed to days.

At­tend­ing the launch were Deputy Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary Fa­rook Ho­sein; Act­ing Deputy Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary Ram­dai Sookdeo; Act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of State Lands Emeris Gar­raway-How­ell; Chair­man of the Agri­cul­tur­al De­vel­op­ment Bank and the Co­coa De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny of T&T Ltd Win­ston Rud­der; Deputy Chair­man of the Na­tion­al Agri­cul­tur­al Mar­ket­ing and De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion Wayne In­nis; Chair­man of the Pa­lo Seco Agri­cul­tur­al En­ter­pris­es Ltd and Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of Ca­roni (1975) Lim­it­ed Li­onel Wayne De Chi; Act­ing Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of ADB, Wendy Sam­sun­dar-Be­har­ry and Se­nior Land In­for­ma­tion Of­fi­cer at the min­istry, Tri­cia Melville.