The earthquake on 8th October, 2005 caused massive destruction, death, injury and displacement in Northern Pakistan. The earthquake destroyed or seriously damaged 600,000 houses rendering nearly 3.5 million people homeless.

The earthquake caused the physical disappearance of land due to landslides and flooding. It was estimated that approximately 10,000 families had lost the land on which they had their home and had no place to rebuild their houses.

Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA) of the Government of Pakistan decided to support people who became landless with a grant to purchase new safe land. The unique and progressive policy ensured the entire family legally acquired the new land. The ERRA Rural Landless Program, which began in June 2007 was implemented in just under one year and was a huge success. The Rural Landless Project combined the work of several agencies, partners and procedures to facilitate applicants in a comfortable and transparent manner. Members of the Revenue Department, ERRA, Army and UN-HABITAT are some of the stakeholders that combined their efforts through a cluster approach to speed up the process of rehabilitation. The system that was put in place and adopted was beneficiary friendly which helped applicants go through the process as swiftly and painlessly as possible. The project reduced the process time for beneficiaries to become landowners from 7 weeks to 1 day. This major feat was achieved by having beneficiaries take part in a ‘One Window Operation’ where the presence of government officials, mobile banking facilities, relevant community members, sellers and buyers in one location allowed the eventual landowners to save both time and money.

A Land Information Managements System (LIMS) was used for the first time by the land management department to ensure transparency through photographic evidence and tracking the mutation of land deeds. LIMS has guaranteed that land records are updated in one day.