KOTA KINABALU - A total of 37,857 outstanding land applications have been completed by the state government through the Land and Survey Department in less than eight years.
Sabah Chief Minister Datuk Seri Hajiji Noor said the department has implemented several strategies to resolve land title issues in Sabah, especially in rural areas.
He said the main strategy was to to settle the backlog of land applications in all districts by implementing the initiative to process all land applications in groups based on the areas the applications came from and applying the communication and information technology (ICT) and the latest geospatial technology.
"Based on the land application statistics, the total backlog on Jan 1, 2015 was 280,695. This was reduced to 37,857 as of Oct 31, this year which is a reduction of 86.5 per cent in less than eight years.
"The department will work on settling the remaining applications in 2023," he said in response to a question by Dr Aliakbar Gulasan (Pas-Appointed) at the Sabah State Legislative Assembly (DUN) session, here on Wednesday.
The answer to the question was presented by Assistant Minister to the Chief Minister Datuk Nizam Abu Bakar Titingan.
Hajiji said through the Sabah Native Land Services Programme (Pantas) which was created to address the issue of native land ownership in rural areas, measurements based on occupation of the land to the issuance of land grants were set within 12 months.
"The number of land grants issued under Pantas from 2012 to Oct 31, 2022 was 27,572 involving an area of 42,429.26 hectares.
"Through Pantas, the percentage of ownership of native land in Sabah increased from 24.5 per cent or 477,171 hectares of 1,946,087 hectares of land ownership in 2010 to 42.7 per cent or 1,135,116 hectares of a total of 2,655,683 hectares of land ownership in 2021," he said.
He added that the state government through the native land surveying initiative had appointed licensed surveyors to carry out land surveying to reduce the dependency on government survey technicians.