We used to have our headquarters on the
middle floor of the Gandhi Hall building on the corner of Merchant
Street and Bo Aung Gyaw Street in downtown Yangon. Apart from my
other duties, I had to take care of the library. It is not much of a
library though and consisted only of four or five large book cases
lined across the hallway. Those days I was quite familiar with the
contents of these bookcases but would be at a loss to describe them
now, save for one.
It was a lather bound book three
fingers thick and the title on the book says “Torrens System”. It
was in the style of leather binding we find with religious books the
book binders on the steps of our great Shwedagon pagoda used to make.
I have no doubt therefore that it must have been a priced collection
some time before, probably when the British Settlement Officers or
the Commissioner were still in office. I went through the book and
thought I was able to grasp and appreciate the idea behind the
Torrens System. Thinking about its contents now, I was impressed most
of all with the spirit of Torrens to make land transactions easy in
contrast to the deeds registration system, its principle of
indefeasibility of the title, and the attending cadastral system that
could accurately reconstruct the boundaries of a given land holding
on the ground in case of disputes.
Talking of the Torrens system, I was
really surprised when a senior agricultural economist turned
political economist, a Myanmar living in Down Under, told me that we
have in fact the Torrens system in Myanmar. In my experience of
working in the government agency that specifically deals with land
administration including assessment of agricultural land tax,
maintaining cadastral maps and registers, collecting agricultural
statistics and handling land disputes I had never heard of or read
about our cadastral system being seen as a Torrens system. I had
worked there for 26 years, half of that in the districts and the
other half at our headquarters in Yangon.
This friend told me that I could find
the reference to the Torrens system in Maung Htin's well known work
“Myanma-le-yar-myay-sanit”(Agricultural land system of Myanmar)
and if I heard him right, he said this system was used particularly
in the “Colony lands”. I was doubly surprised because I am quite
familiar with this work and I was definite I didn't notice anything
about the Torrens system in there. Afterward I looked for Maung
Htin's book, read through it carefully, and yet couldn't find
anything of Torrens!
Later, looking for the possible source
of reference for Torrens system in Myanmar I found the following in
Housing,
Land, and Property Rights in Burma, 2004, by Nancy Hudson-Rodd:
“The
Land Records and Settlement Department in Burma adopted a modified
Torrens System of land registration, for all areas settled by the
colonial state. British. Burma was conquered in two stages, 1826
Lower Burma and 1886 in Upper Burma, becoming a colony of the British
Empire. To suit these different jurisdictions, the Land and Revenue
Act 1874 and the Upper Burma Land Revenue Act 1889 were two acts that
effected the imposition of a tax to cover the cost of administration
and governance by the British colonial government on settled and
alienated land in both Lower and Upper Burma. Legal control and
classification of land in Burma was initiated by the British in 1876
as part of their introduction of a revenue collection and taxation
system. Cadastral surveys were conducted to classify all land
according to ownership and use.” (p. 18)
Consulting resources on Torrens system
on the Web, as of now, shows that Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and
Philippines are using the system. A survey on the earlier adoption of
the system by J E Hogg entitled Registration
of the Title to Land Throughout the Empire, 1920, cited 17
statutes including that of “Federated Malay States”. However,
there was nothing on “Burma” as I hastily looked through it.
Going back to Nancy Hudson-Rodd's
statement, historical evidence of Myanmar shows that cadastral
surveys initiated earlier on holding basis were superseded in 1878
“by field to field surveys on professional lines followed up by
regular settlements.” According to Wikipedia entry on “Torrens
Title”, the system originated in 1858 in South Australia:
“A
boom in land speculation and a haphazard grant system resulted in the
loss of over 75% of the 40,000 land grants issued in the colony
(now state)
of South
Australia in
the early 1800s. To resolve the deficiencies of the common law and
deeds registration system, Robert
Torrens,
a member of the colony's House of Assembly, proposed a new title
system in 1858, and it was quickly adopted. The Torrens title system
was based on a central registry of all the land in the jurisdiction
of South Australia, embodied in the Real Property Act 1886 (SA).”
Recalling that by the time cadastral
surveys on professional lines were adopted in Myanmar in 1878, the
Torrens system had already been in place in South Australia for 20
years, and so it seems unthinkable that the colonial professionals
taking care of cadastral surveys in Myanmar would have been entirely
ignorant of the Torrens system. However, it is truly odd that as far
as I can ascertain, no historical documents on land revenue
administration in Myanmar ever mentioned the Torrens system. Besides,
the cadastral system in Myanmar has not been significantly changed
from those days till now. From my personal experience, I had never
known any of my seniors or juniors ever discussing anything on the
Torrens system and I may safely boast that I could have been the only
one around that time who had looked through the Torrens book I talked
about.
Perhaps Hudson-Rodd was passing her
judgment on the characteristics of the rural land registration system
in Myanmar as “Torrens like” and not meant to say about its
origins. Perhaps my elder economist friend, a collaborator of
Hudson-Rodd, has misread Maung Htin. Or was it a quirk of memory
lapse?
To me, the real issue is that whether
we would call the current system “Torrens like”, “Embryonic
Torrens”, or by any other name, we should be doing a reality check.
Should we not critically examine the successes of the Torrens system
as practiced in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Philippines to see
if we have missed the boat and act accordingly?
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