Land Information

The Cadastral Map is a primary requirement to register title to land under Registration of Title Act No.21 of 1998 and Surveyor General is mandated to fulfill requirement of preparation of Cadastral Maps under section 11 of the same Act and section 10 of the Survey Act No.17 of 2002.

A cadastre is a methodically arranged inventory of land parcels of individual ownership with unique identification number based on a survey of property boundaries. Thus, a cadastre is essentially a systematic description of land parcels within an area. At the beginning of country cadastre, the unit of Cadastral Map was a village and recently changed as a Grama Niladhari(GN) division of a district. A cadastral map consists essentially of two parts via graphic record and textual record.

The Surveyor General is responsible to maintain a base of cadastral survey information as per section 8 of the Survey Act and also to fulfill the requirements in section 36 of Registration of Title Act. Accordingly, Survey Department maintains Cadastral Database, as part of its Land Information System(LIS), in both digital and manuscript form.

The LIS has been sourced with the field surveyed data under the Land Title Registration Project, currently being proceeds as “Bimsaviya”. The Digital Geo-spatial data collected for preparation of Cadastral Maps have been processed to create a parcel based LIS and attributed with Tenement Information, collected for the requirements for issue of land titles.