Sovereign Land Banking in South Asia: Legal Genealogy, Title Mechanics, Financial Architecture, and AI Augmentation

Public land in South Asia sits at the junction of colonial revenue law, post-Partition redistribution and present-day demand for serviced industrial and urban land. This paper traces that legal genealogy in three South Asian jurisdictions, from the Permanent Settlement of 1793 through post-1947 abolition and ceiling statutes, including the compression of Pakistani ceilings from 500 to 100 irrigated acres and their partial reversal by the Qazalbash Waqf judgment. It then examines why presumptive deed registration and fiscal revenue records fail to prove title, and how fragmentation (86 per cent of Indian holdings are small or marginal, averaging 1.08 ha) traps cultivators in low mechanisation and low income. On that basis it proposes a generic institutional architecture for a sovereign public land bank. The bank assembles land through pooling, town planning schemes, transferable development rights and regeneration partnerships, and balances an equity mandate for the landless with an enterprise mandate for plug-and-play industrial parks. It finances itself through land value capture, formalised as landowner-incentive and fiscal self-financing conditions. The paper sets out cross-border financing structures, namely leasehold-as-equity SPVs, REITs and InvITs, land-backed green bonds, phytoremediation concessions and exchange-cleared smart leases, which admit international capital without alienating sovereign freehold. A four-tier sovereign AI stack supports cadastral reconciliation, agro-ecological suitability screening, spatial quantile mass appraisal and digital twins. A 60-month roadmap completes the design. Statistics are drawn from official sources; unverified figures are marked, and illustrative projections are labelled as assumptions.

Written in a personal capacity; the views expressed are those of the author and do not represent any government or ministry. Nothing in this paper is investment or financial advice. Published in the KSCCN series.