eSakor Portal National Land Commission Secretariat (NLCS) is at the forefront among agencies in Bhutan that have leveraged the potential of ICTs for enhancing efficiency in government functioning. The implementation of ICT based system in NLCS goes back to 2012 with the implementation of Rural e-Sakor, an online system for the rural land transaction. In 2013, NLCS implemented another online system (Urban eSakor) for processing the urban land transaction. The term eSakor is translated as ‘e’ meaning ‘electronic’, ‘Sa’ meaning ‘land’ and Kor is ‘about’. It is an integrated land information service portal.
NLCS has been trying to improve the efficiency and effectiveness in implementing on-line systems for providing services to the citizen of Bhutan, and with more experiences, over the years NLCS has been improving a lot.
With the introduction of two on-line systems, NLCS left the traditional way of processing the land transaction in Bhutan. However, many improvements were needed on both the systems.
In 2015 NLCS in collaboration with IDA International, Singapore and Department of IT and Telecom did a thorough diagnosis of the systems and documented them. In 2016, the urban land transaction system was re-developed covering all the deficiencies found from the previous system with additional modules, features and functionalities with financial support from World Bank. In 2018, the rural land transaction system re-development was carried out.
From now on, all the systems will be all under eSakor Portal which will have urban land transaction system, rural land transaction system, land mortgage system, land related grievance redressal system and online land tax payment system.