Ask anyone in Dhaka who has tried to transfer a plot of inherited land what the hardest part was, and the answer will be: the paperwork. A family sells a parcel, signs the deed, pays the registration fee, and then discovers the real ordeal is still ahead: getting the khatian (record of rights) updated to reflect the new owner. This second step, called mutation, is where months disappear, where “processing fees” gradually turn into bribes, and where a legitimate transaction can stall for reasons no one will put in writing.
This is a story about institutions, and about what economists call transaction costs—the hidden expenses of simply getting a deal done. Bangladeshis routinely pay far more than the official price of land ownership. Registration alone can consume six to ten percent of a property’s value in stamp duty and fees, according to World Bank assessments. There are even instances where the full registration process dragged on for close to 245 days, whereas officially mutation should take about a week. However, in practice, it drags for weeks or months when files go missing, or officials find reasons to delay. A 2023 study by Transparency International Bangladesh found that roughly a third of landowners reported paying informal fees to get their mutation processed, and that about six in ten rural land records did not reflect who actually possessed the land. These are not just inefficiencies; they are a tax on ordinary families, paid in time, uncertainty, and cash under the table.
Economists have a name for this. Ronald Coase argued that every transaction carries costs beyond the price itself: the cost of verifying who owns what, processing paperwork, and resolving disputes when something goes wrong. When property rights are clearly defined and easily verified, every future transaction involving that asset becomes cheaper too, scholars showed. A clean land record helps not just today’s buyer but the next bank issuing a mortgage against it, and the next heir. Bangladesh’s mutation system fails on exactly these grounds: verification is slow, processing is discretionary, and the resulting uncertainty compounds for years.
This is where blockchain enters the conversation, and where it usually goes wrong. It is often sold as a cure for corruption and inefficiency, as though digitising records on a shared ledger would fix a broken process. It does not. A blockchain guarantees that, once a record is written, it cannot be altered later—but it does nothing to ensure the record is accurate when it is written. Technologists call this the oracle problem: false or manipulated information entered into an immutable system becomes permanently, unchangeably wrong. A tamper-proof ledger of bad data is still bad data, just harder to fix.
The more useful idea is not the ledger but a simple institutional rule that could run on top of it: require both the responsible land official and the landowner to independently confirm a transaction, using the biometric verification systems already built into the national ID infrastructure, before it is recorded. Under this dual-confirmation model, neither party can unilaterally alter or falsify the record. The innovation is procedural, not technological—blockchain is merely a convenient, secure platform for implementing it.
Other countries offer instructive, if imperfect, lessons. Georgia is frequently cited for cutting property registration from days to minutes, but the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre found no audited evidence that blockchain itself drove those gains. Most of the improvement traces to a modern digital registry built years before blockchain was added. India’s state-level pilots have produced patchy results, without reliable national data to judge them by. Bhutan has piloted a digital-identity-linked consent model conceptually similar to dual confirmation, though it has not yet published outcomes. The honest lesson is not that Bangladesh should copy any of these models, but that administrative reform, not blockchain branding, explains most of the improvement wherever it has occurred.
None of this is free or simple. It would require legal reform, systems that actually communicate within itself, cybersecurity safeguards, and real attention to citizens who lack digital access or biometric registration. Overselling the technology would be as damaging as ignoring the problem altogether.
What Bangladesh needs is not a leap of faith but a measured test: a carefully designed pilot of dual-confirmation mutation in a limited number of districts, with clear before-and-after measurement of processing time, informal payments, and record accuracy. If it works, it can scale. If it doesn’t, the country will have learned something at low cost and that, ultimately, is how technology in public service should be judged: not by how novel it sounds, but by how much faster, cheaper, and more trustworthy it makes the ordinary business of owning land.
Tenzin Wangchuk is an international undergraduate student of economics at IUBAT in Dhaka.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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