Land ownership in the Merged Districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the seven former Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram, North Waziristan, and South Waziristan, is constitutionally protected under the same laws that apply to the rest of Pakistan following the 25th Constitutional Amendment of May 2018. In practice, however, formal land records do not exist for most of these districts. The ownership of most land rests with tribes communally, passed through generations by oral tradition and local knowledge rather than registered title. Courts extended to the region after the merger cannot adjudicate land disputes without documentary proof, which most residents cannot provide. A phased GIS-based land settlement project is underway but covers only a fraction of the merged districts’ 27,220 square kilometres so far.
The land situation in the Merged Districts is unlike any other in Pakistan. The absence of a formal revenue record system is not a gap that can be filled by visiting a Patwari office or checking an online portal. It is a structural absence that was built into the governance model under which FATA operated for over seventy years. Understanding what rights exist, what evidence can be used to assert them, and what the government is doing to create a formal system is essential for anyone dealing with land in these districts.
Why There Were No Land Records in Former FATA
From 1947 until the merger in 2018, the seven tribal agencies that formed FATA were governed under the Frontier Crimes Regulations, a set of laws originally enacted by British colonial administrators in the early twentieth century. The FCR created a parallel governance system in which formal Pakistani law, including land revenue law, did not apply. Political Agents, appointed by the President, held near-absolute authority over their tribal districts. Formal courts had no jurisdiction. Revenue departments operating under the West Pakistan Land Revenue Act 1967 had no presence.
This meant that the land record system that developed across Punjab, Sindh, KPK’s settled districts, and Balochistan over the same period, with Patwari offices, Jamabandi records, Khasra Girdawari updates, and district revenue hierarchies, simply never took root in FATA. A few pockets of formal land records existed in Kurram and North Waziristan from the British era, but these covered a small fraction of the territory and had not been systematically maintained.
The Business Recorder’s analysis of the land digitization project confirmed the result: for the past seventy years, the land record system in the Merged Areas had not been developed. The ownership of most land rested with the tribe. Informal settlements and local knowledge of land demarcation passed through generations had been the prevalent land management mechanism.
The State of Ownership After the Merger
The 25th Constitutional Amendment passed by the National Assembly in May 2018 with a 229-1 vote formally merged FATA with KPK, abolishing the FCR and extending constitutional rights, including property rights under Article 23, to the approximately five million residents of the former tribal areas. All laws in force in KPK were extended to the Merged Districts after the Peshawar High Court’s September 2018 judgment, which the Supreme Court upheld, declared the transitional FATA Interim Governance Regulations unconstitutional.
In 2019, the KPK government formally extended land laws to the merged districts, with Deputy Commissioners and Additional District Commissioners empowered to handle revenue matters and political tehsildars entrusted to collect revenues. However, as researchers and provincial officials documented, extending laws without establishing the institutional infrastructure to implement them created a legal and administrative vacuum. Courts were established, but as the Land Portal analysis confirmed, courts cannot protect individual rights to land ownership in the absence of documentary proof, which most residents of the merged districts simply do not have. Land disputes cannot be brought to court when the court requires documents that do not exist.
The current state of property rights in the Merged Districts, as summarized in the KPK Revenue Department’s own settlement project documents, is characterized by two main features: land ownership is largely undocumented, and most rights of usufruct are communal rather than individual.
Three Categories of Land Ownership in the Merged Districts
Understanding ownership in the Merged Districts requires understanding that land there falls into three broad categories, each with its own ownership structure and dispute dynamics.
The first category is individually settled land where a specific person or family has a recognized claim going back to British-era records or to formal settlement operations that did occur in limited pockets of Kurram and North Waziristan. These cases represent the minority. Where formal records exist, they carry the same legal weight as land records anywhere else in Pakistan and can be used as evidence in court.
The second category is tribally owned communal land, functionally equivalent to Shamilat but without formal settlement records. This is the largest category by area. The tribe holds the land collectively, individual families cultivate specific parcels by long-standing practice and tribal acknowledgment, and the boundaries between tribal holdings are known through oral tradition. As the Radio Free Europe Gandhara reporting documented, these lands include forests and pastures that are valuable for cattle farmers, and the increase in land prices since the merger has given financial urgency to boundaries that were previously managed by Jirga consensus without significant economic stakes.
The third category is land claimed by the government, either historically as state land from the FCR era, or more recently as the government has expanded its presence to build administrative facilities, security installations, roads, and border terminals. The National Logistics Cell’s contested claim to land at Torkham border crossing, where tribal residents forcibly shut down construction of a customs terminal in 2019, is a documented example of how government land acquisition without formal title documentation or community consent has generated violent conflict.
The Role of Jirga in Land Rights
Before the merger and continuing substantially after it, the Jirga, the tribal council of elders, was the primary institution for recognizing, allocating, and adjudicating land rights in the former FATA. The Jirga operates through oral agreement, collective witness, and community enforcement rather than written documentation. A Jirga decision on land boundaries is recognized within the community as authoritative in a way that no court order from outside the area has historically been.
The 2025 academic research on barriers to land record formalization in former FATA, published in the Pakistan Social Sciences Review journal, documented this through direct testimony. Tribal residents stated that they viewed formal courts as slow, expensive, and biased toward the wealthy and politically connected, while Jirga was seen as quicker, culturally relevant, and more affordable. One interviewee stated: “Pakistan is trying to bind us with laws we didn’t make and do not know about. We believe that the only solution of our land issues is our tribal customs and Jirga system.”
This cultural preference for Jirga is not simply conservatism. It reflects the practical reality that for people whose land claims rest entirely on community knowledge, oral tradition, and generational practice rather than paper records, the Jirga can acknowledge and validate those claims in a way that a formal court, requiring documentary proof, structurally cannot. The formal court system has expanded significantly since the merger, but its utility for resolving land disputes in areas without records remains limited until the land settlement and digitization process creates the documentary foundation that courts need.
Displacement and Its Effect on Land Claims
Decades of military operations against militant groups in former FATA, beginning in 2003 and accelerating with Operation Rah-e-Nijat in South Waziristan in 2009, displaced millions of residents from their land. The Radio Free Europe Gandhara reporting documented that at least three million FATA residents were displaced by the violence that first erupted in 2003. When they returned, years later, many found themselves embroiled in land and property disputes.
The Mehsud-Wazir dispute between residents of Makin and Razmak, documented by Gandhara, is illustrative. Nearly half a million members of the Mehsud tribe were displaced by the 2009 military operation. When they returned in 2015, they found Razmak’s Wazir tribe had built houses on what the Mehsuds claimed was their land. Both sides had conflicting claims, and both pointed to British-era maps and oral traditions as evidence. Neither had formal title documents. The dispute led to armed clashes from 2017 onward.
This pattern, displacement breaking the continuity of physical occupation, returning families finding others occupying their land, and no formal records to adjudicate between competing claims, has played out across the merged districts. The Pakistan Today analysis of land issues in the merged districts confirmed that virtually every village or tribe and even every family has land disputes, with some erupting into violent conflict whose exact death toll cannot be quantified precisely.
The Land Settlement and Digitization Project
The KPK Board of Revenue, with UNDP technical assistance through the Merged Areas Governance Project, began addressing the records gap through a GIS-based land settlement operation. The pilot phase, completed in the Alamsher and Dingeela revenue estates of upper Kurram district, was the first formal land digitization exercise in the former FATA. The results were transformative for the residents directly affected.
A resident of Kurram quoted in Business Recorder’s coverage of the project stated: “We can now access our lands sitting in our homes. We can grow crops on our lands, build a market, and can sell too if we want, without any fear of tribal feuds.” Another resident noted that land prices doubled after the settlement of records because formal title created a foundation for legitimate market transactions. Before the project, getting a land record cost thousands of rupees in informal payments and required frequent visits to distant Patwari offices. After settlement, a formal record cost Rs100.
The KPK Revenue Department’s settlement project for the Merged Districts was formally structured in two phases. Phase One covers seven sub-divisions including Khar in Bajaur, Wazir in Bannu, Landi Kotal in Khyber, Dara Adam Khel in Kohat, Upper and Lower Kurram in Kurram, and Hassan Khel in Peshawar, with completion planned within three and a half years. Phase Two covers the remaining 18 sub-divisions over five years. The settlement process uses a hybrid approach of Very High Resolution satellite imagery for hilly and inaccessible terrain and advanced surveying equipment for congested areas, with GIS-based Khasra measurement recording the dimensions of each land parcel.
The overall KPK land digitization context, as the KPK Director of Land Records confirmed, saw Phase One computerize seven divisional headquarter districts and Phase Two target thirteen additional districts for completion by June 2025. The merged district settlement is an additional and distinct exercise because there was no existing record to digitize, only a first settlement to conduct from scratch.
Asserting and Protecting Land Rights Now
For residents of the merged districts, the practical question is how to protect and assert land rights in the current period, before formal settlement reaches their area. Several approaches have evidentiary and practical value.
British-era records, though their boundaries and relevance are contested, remain the most authoritative paper documentation of tribal land claims in the merged districts. Where such records exist in district archives or the Board of Revenue, they should be obtained as certified copies and preserved. Former diplomat Ayaz Wazir, quoted by Gandhara, noted that a coordinated government effort to use British-era maps and land documents could help tribes resolve problems through Jirgas, and that showing these maps and documents through local administration could support claim validation.
Jirga decisions on land boundaries, even without formal legal standing in the current court system, serve as community-recognized evidence of historical understanding. Written records of Jirga proceedings, signed by tribal elders and witnesses, provide a stronger evidentiary foundation than purely oral claims when formal settlement begins. The settlement officers conducting GIS-based operations in the merged districts are, as the settlement project documentation confirms, working with local elders and district administration to establish ownership. Community consensus expressed through elder testimony and Jirga records informs the settlement process.
For inheritance in the merged districts, the same structural absence of formal records creates the same problems it creates for ownership generally. Women, who were excluded from land under tribal custom and whose exclusion continues in practice despite the extension of the 1962 Shariat Act, are in a particularly disadvantaged position when there are no formal records to reflect their legal entitlements. The land settlement process, by creating formal individual ownership records for the first time, represents the first real opportunity to include women as formally registered title holders in communities where tribal custom has historically prevented this.
For anyone buying or selling land in the merged districts currently, the absence of formal records means that standard KPK land purchase procedures, including verification of the KPK land record portal, cannot provide the title security that such verification gives in the settled districts. Transactions in most parts of the merged districts still depend on community recognition, tribal elder witness, and the informal systems that governed land before the merger. This is not a reason to avoid transactions, but it is a reason to ensure that community elders formally witness any agreement, that written records are made of the transaction and its terms, and that registration with whatever formal mechanism exists in the relevant district is completed as it becomes available.
What the Peshawar High Court and Courts Can Do
The extension of the regular court system to the merged districts after the merger means that land disputes can now, in principle, be brought before Sessions Courts, the Peshawar High Court, and ultimately the Supreme Court. The Peshawar High Court has jurisdiction over the merged districts and has heard constitutional petitions relating to land and governance issues in the region.
However, as the Land Portal and Pakistan Today analyses both confirmed, the courts require documentary proof that most residents cannot provide. The court system’s utility for individual land rights protection is fundamentally limited by the absence of a revenue record system that can generate the documents courts need. This is not a permanent condition. As the GIS-based settlement operation progresses and formal records are created for each sub-division and eventually each Khasra, the documentary foundation that allows courts to function as intended will gradually be put in place.
Until then, the most effective dispute resolution mechanism for the majority of land claims in the merged districts remains the Jirga, supplemented where possible by engagement with the district administration and the settlement teams conducting the formal land record operation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do Pakistani land laws apply to the merged districts of former FATA?
Yes. The 25th Constitutional Amendment of May 2018 merged FATA with KPK, and all KPK laws including land revenue law were extended to the merged districts following the Peshawar High Court’s September 2018 judgment. In 2019, the KPK government formally established the mechanism for land law administration in the merged districts. The legal framework exists. The administrative infrastructure and documentary record system are still being built out.
Why can’t courts resolve land disputes in the merged districts?
Courts require documentary proof of ownership, which most residents of the merged districts cannot provide because formal land records were never established during the FCR era. A court cannot adjudicate a boundary dispute between two tribal claims when neither party can produce a Jamabandi, a Khasra record, or a registered title document. The ongoing GIS-based land settlement project is creating these records for the first time, and court-based resolution will become more accessible as the settlement operation covers more of the merged districts.
What is the GIS-based land settlement project and how does it help?
The KPK Board of Revenue, with UNDP technical assistance, is conducting a GIS-based settlement operation to create formal land records in the merged districts for the first time. Phase One covers seven sub-divisions including areas in Bajaur, Khyber, Kurram, and Kohat. The project uses satellite imagery and surveying equipment to measure each Khasra, works with community elders to establish ownership, and creates a digital record that gives landowners formal title. The pilot project in Kurram’s Alamsher and Dingeela villages showed that formal records doubled land values and enabled legal market transactions.
Can women inherit land in the merged districts?
Under the West Pakistan Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act 1962, which was extended to the merged districts after the 2018 merger, women have a legal entitlement to their Sharia-mandated inheritance share in all property including land. In practice, tribal custom in most merged district communities has excluded women from land inheritance, and the absence of formal records means there is no document that can reflect a woman’s legal share. The land settlement process represents the first opportunity to formally register women as title holders in these communities.
What evidence should residents preserve to support their land claims during settlement?
Residents should preserve any British-era survey maps or land documents, written records of Jirga decisions about land boundaries, family genealogy records, witness statements from community elders acknowledging occupation and boundaries, and any tax or revenue receipts from the FCR era. When settlement teams arrive in an area, community elder testimony and Jirga records of historical understanding are the primary evidence used to establish ownership in the absence of formal documentation.