KOTA KINABALU: The Sabah Land and Surveys Department continues to speed up the issuance of native land titles amid the various challenges it is faced with, says its director Datuk Bernard Liew.
He said the challenges include manpower issues, lack of vehicles and technical difficulties such as land disputes.
“We are trying our best. We have also outsourced surveyors to make up for the lack of manpower,” he said when contacted on Wednesday (July 27).
Liew was responding to complaints and calls for the natives, especially those living outside Kota Kinabalu for their land titles to be issued sooner.
Some claimed to have been waiting between five and 10 years to have their native lands legally placed under their names.
Liew said land disputes, scattered and far off land areas, lack of field vehicles and manpower were among the main reasons for delays.
He added that there were only about 50 teams of surveyors in Sabah to cater to the thousands of applications every day.
Each team consists of four to five members comprising a leader and assistants.
Liew also said that the Sabah Customary Land Service Program (Pantas) program implemented since 2011 was still running to address this issue.
“For the record, the department has managed to reduce the number of native land title applications from about 250,000 backlog cases in 2015 to around 48,000 last year.
“We have also managed to increase the percentage of native lands with grants from 24.5% (477,171ha) in 2010 to 41.7% (1.13mil ha) in 2021 statewide,” he said.
