The Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) will introduce a system to digitally record house-lot coordinates, photographs and allottees’ acknowledgements from November 1, following concerns about persons building on land not allocated to them.
Housing Minister Collin Croal announced the measures while in Bartica, saying they were intended to improve accuracy and establish a verifiable record of the land shown to each beneficiary.
Under the new arrangement, surveyors will use tablets to electronically record lot coordinates and reference points during identification exercises. Photographs will document the allottee’s presence, while beneficiaries will digitally sign an acknowledgement confirming that they were shown their designated lot and that its coordinates were recorded.
“This is being introduced to safeguard the allottee as well as the agency,” Croal said, according to a ministry release.
Allottees will be able to request copies of their coordinates for future reference. The ministry said the system was undergoing testing and would be used nationwide from November 1.
The announcement follows a recent dispute over a house constructed at Le Ressouvenir, East Coast Demerara.
Kiskadee Watch reported on October 15 that single mother Subrina Ragubir faced an instruction to demolish her concrete home after the ministry said she had built on a commercial parcel rather than her allocated residential lot.
Ragubir maintained that she had followed officials’ instructions when locating the land. The ministry denied that its surveyors had misdirected her, saying she was allocated residential Parcel 394 but constructed on commercial Parcel 460.
It said arrangements had been made to identify her residential lot and that she had received a steel-and-cement subsidy voucher. Ragubir questioned how she would finance replacing the home she had already built.
The latest release did not identify particular disputes that prompted the new system or state how existing contested identifications would be reviewed.
Croal stressed that beneficiaries must ensure surveyors show them all four boundary markers, commonly called paals, before accepting identification of their lots.
He cautioned against relying solely on layout plans or assumptions about where allocated land was situated, saying this had contributed to construction on other persons’ properties.
While CH&PA was responsible for accurately identifying lots, he said, allottees were responsible for monitoring and maintaining the markers afterwards, particularly where construction would not begin immediately.
Lot identification is already conducted through the agency’s Surveys Unit, with beneficiaries invited in batches as housing-scheme development advances. Stabroek News reported in April 2025 that 390 middle- and high-income allottees had identified their lots at Wales through such exercises.
The proposed system would add electronic records, photographs and digital acknowledgements to that process.
The release did not disclose the system’s cost, arrangements for storing and accessing the records, or whether previously identified lots would also be entered into the database.
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