incentives for both sellers and purchasers of land to avoid registration of transfer documents, since this is likely to incur substantial one-off taxes including: stamp duties on sale or lease, capital gains tax, land value increments, and transfer duties. Instead, most sellers/purchasers adopt cheap and simple practices for transferring de facto 'title', including the General Power of Attorney, Agreement to Sell, and Wills, none of which is legally required to be registered, and all of which is to a greater or lesser extent uncertain (Bijlani and Rao 1993).

Several lessons emerge from Bank-supported and other international experience with land titling and registration schemes over the last 10-20 years (Hanstad 1996, Holstein 1997). Experience from projects implemented during the 1980s showed that performance was poor where multiple objectives were sought within a multi-agency institutional framework, and where government commitment was lacking (Wachter and English 1992). Projects initiated during the 1990s tend to have a clearer focus on the principal objective of issuing registered titles to land holders. A single agency approach is preferable where possible, in which the agency concerned is responsible for base mapping for cadastral purposes, and takes the lead in adjudication, cadastral surveying and registration functions. Land settlement and adjudication needs to be conducted in as transparent a manner as possible, preferably in the field with maximum community involvement (including local representation on settlement teams)<sup>33</sup> . It is essential that transparency and accountability also be promoted by means of a well-funded, long-term public information and disclosure campaign, which is particularly important to reach socially excluded groups (e.g. currently unregistered tenants). Staff incentives and training often prove to be critical, particularly where public salaries are low and opportunities for rent-seeking are widespread. Consideration needs to be given to what aspects of land administration may be more efficiently contracted out to the private sector, and mechanisms to ensure quality and professionalism.

International experience also shows systematic (e.g. village by village) rather than sporadic (on-demand) registration to be preferable, since it is likely to achieve faster and more complete coverage, economies of scale, and greater transparency. It is not without attendant risks and disadvantages, however: systematic registration requires government to be proactive, the cost burden falls to government, and the timing of adjudication may not suit land holders (e.g. with respect to inheritance). Regarding tenure security, major concerns should include: the substance of tenurial rights to be registered (e.g. transferability, rights to lease, mortgage etc.) rather than their name (freehold vs. leasehold); recognition of de facto or prescriptive rights (whether or not they are formally documented); and the identities of rightholders (e.g. joint titles or independent titles for women as well as men). Finally, caution should be exercised in the introduction of computerized information technology (IT). Current failures may lie in unclear objectives and methods, faulty manual systems, and a lack of skilled staff, in which case the introduction of IT alone will not solve existing problems. In such situations it is usually better to introduce incremental improvements, and to support the computerization of land registration by starting with new parcels and subsequent transactions, with manual and computerized systems operating in parallel for some time.

The Orissa study highlights some of the ways in which conventional land survey and settlement operations discriminate systematically against the rural poor and other socially excluded groups (Mearns and Sinha 1998).

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