Secretary Conrado M. Estrella III jumpstarts DAR digitalization

Secretary Conrado M. Estrella III issued ultra-portable, data-collecting devices to the field force to accelerate the digitalization of the Department of Agrarian Reform and to jumpstart the building and operationalization of the Agrarian Information Resource Center.

Critical to DAR’s mandate is to build an enhanced information network of 2.9 million agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs), 5,290 Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Organizations (ARBOs) and 2,252 Agrarian Reform Communities (ARCs) and their locations in 4.9 million hectares of awarded agrarian lands, nationwide.

This information network will gather, verify, validate and organize data about ARBs to enable an effective assessment of impact of support services and to ensure strategic targeting of delivery of these services to maximize benefits for ARBs.

Digitalization, among other things, would solve decades-old problems of mismatching and duplications in the delivery of support services, especially farm equipment to modernize agricultural production.

For Project SPLIT or the Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling, a Foreign Assisted Project by World Bank, the digitalization begins with the cleansing of Individual Land Distribution Folders or ILDF, specifically the veracity of the data contained therein such as the ARB’s names, their metes and boundaries, and the crops planted, among others, that are vital in the processing of lands subjected for parcelization.

The marching orders of President Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos, Jr. for the entire government bureaucracy to digitalize includes sharing and integration of data. For DAR and the Land Registration Authority (LRA), the utilization enhanced Citizen’s Land Registration Portal (CPRP) is being worked out in earnest, according to the mandate of Malacanang.

Building the DAR Agrarian Information Resource Center would necessitate faster data collection and consolidation from the field with the use of handy laptops, equipped with industry grade features and technical specifications to accelerate the creation of DAR digitalization platforms and data bases.

Sec. Estrella has ordered the release to all DAR Regional and Provincial Offices of 400 units