Abu Dhabi is one of the richest cities in the world, boasting modern architectural wonders from the first circular skyscraper to the dramatic Etihad towers to the world’s farthest leaning tower. When it comes to managing the land deeds for the 375 sq. miles on which the modern cityscape is built, there is a scope to digitize them and share these records with the citizens and other stakeholders using cutting-edge technology.
Starting from selling a piece of land to constructing a building or residential complex to selling the units to managing tenancy, there are a multitude of steps involved in creating a land deed record and the process can span up to six years to complete.
“Unfortunately, all of this is not documented properly,” says Amey Rajput, General Manager of the Blockchain Public Sector and Supply Chain Practice at Tech Mahindra, the leading provider of digital transformation consulting and business reengineering services and solutions based in Pune, India. “The Department of Urban Planning & Municipalities [DPM] had given the Abu Dhabi City Municipality [ADM] a road map of what they wanted to adopt in the future to digitize their organization and one of the use cases was a land registry.”
With its experience in building enhanced blockchain-based, customer-centric systems within its public sector practice, Tech Mahindra was tapped to bring the city’s paper-based real estate records into the modern era.
“A team from Tech Mahindra travelled to the capital of the United Arab Emirates at the end of 2019 to figure out the gaps and opportunities in their processes,” says Rajput. What they learned was that there were multiple external stakeholders and internal municipal departments coming together at any given stage of the land deed process, and they all leveraged disparate systems and applications.
After two months, the team proposed a streamlined blockchain-based system that eliminated the friction of document sharing. “Our solution gets all the stakeholders within an ecosystem together, where you can digitally share or view your deed with other companies and agencies or other citizens as well,” says Rajput.