DENR vows to finish century-old cadastral survey of PHL before 2016

By ELIZABETH MARCELO, GMA News

Published August 28, 2014 2:32pm

Environment Secretary Ramon Paje on Thursday said that the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) could finish the government’s century-old cadastral survey project under the term of President Benigno Aquino III.

During the presentation of the DENR’s P20.8-billion proposed budget for 2015, Paje said the DENR aimed to finish the property survey in the remaining 881 cities and municipalities yet to be covered by the cadastral project.

“It’s the longest program of this country and it has never been completed,” Paje told the House Committee on Appropriations currently hearing the P2.6-trillion allocations under the proposed 2015 national budget.

“We promise that if you give us the support for 2015, we might be able to finish this in 2015, ahead of the original target of 2016,” Paje said.

A cadastral survey is meant to determine the administrative boundary of a city or a municipality and its component barangays, the DENR website said.

It also includes the determination of administrative boundary of lots in alienable and disposable lands of the public domain for purposes of land titling.

The country’s Cadastral Survey Program started way back in 1913, with the enactment of Commonwealth Act No. 2259, otherwise known as the Cadastral Act.

But through the years, the project has not been given enough resources for its implementation.

Paje said that since the launch of the program in 1913 until the end of 2009, the government had only completed the cadastral survey of 753 cities and municipalities, or just 46 percent of the 1,634 cities and municipalities of the country.

“For 96 years the country has only completed 46 percent of the survey,” Paje said, boasting that when the Aquino administration continued the project in 2010, the DENR was able to survey 225 cities and municipalities as of June 30, 2014.

He said 538 more cities and municipalities were undergoing survey.

Paje said that the DENR's main challenge now was to cover 118 municipalities in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) under the survey.

He cited law peace and order concerns for the difficulty.

“Hindi po kami makapasok diyan (ARMM). Sabi ng aming mga surveyor, hindi sila makapasok dahil binabaril sila. So ang ginawa namin was we entered an agreement with the local governments in ARMM...We gave them the budget so their experts will be the ones to conduct the cadastral survey and submit the report to us,” Paje said.

He said that aside from conducting the survey, the DENR also computerized 8.3 million public land and survey records. Paje said that for 2015 the agency aimed to computerize about 97 more land records data and make it accessible online.

Paje said that for 2015 the DENR also aimed to issue some 61,000 patents for residential, commercial and industrial lands and 56,000 more for agricultural lands under their Cadastral Survey and Land Management Program. —NB, GMA News

Tags: 2015budget, denr