Case study 10
Land Acquisition and Resettlement Management Tracking System (LARMTS)
LARMTS is a government GIS platform for the land side of large infrastructure projects. It maps every parcel a project needs, tracks acquisition and compensation for each affected owner, follows the resettlement of the people displaced, and records their grievances through to resolution. It was deployed separately for two national infrastructure projects in Bangladesh, MRT Line 5 (Northern Route) and the Coastal Embankment Improvement Project, Phase-1 (CEIP-1). Both follow the same land acquisition and resettlement process, but each project has its own land, affected people and records.
No public site or source code. The architecture and the decisions behind it are described below.
- Lead engineer
- Enterprise
- GovTech
- GIS, Land Acquisition, Resettlement, Infrastructure, Grievance Management
- Node.js
- Express
- PostgreSQL/PostGIS
- React
- Leaflet
What LARMTS does
- Interactive GIS map of every parcel a project needs to acquire
- Land acquisition tracking, parcel by parcel
- Compensation tracking for each affected owner
- Resettlement tracking for displaced people
- Grievance management, from complaint to resolution
- Reporting for project officials
- Separate deployments for MRT Line 5 (Northern Route) and CEIP-1, each with its own parcels, affected people and records
The problem
Large infrastructure projects acquire land parcel by parcel and must compensate and resettle every affected person. On paper it's hard to see what has been paid, what is disputed, and where.
Approach
Parcels live as geometries in PostGIS and are drawn on a Leaflet map. Each parcel links to its owners, valuations, compensation payments and grievances, so officials move between the map and the case file.
Key decisions
- D1
Map as the index
Pick a parcel on the map and see everything attached to it.
- D2
Spatial queries in the database
PostGIS answers which parcels a corridor touches directly in SQL.
- D3
Grievances as records
Disputes have their own workflow and reporting, so nothing is lost between field visits.
Highlights
- Implemented grievance management and reporting.
- Deployed for two national projects in Bangladesh: MRT Line 5 (Northern Route) and the Coastal Embankment Improvement Project, Phase-1 (CEIP-1).
My contributions
- Led a team of 4–5 engineers at Semicolon IT Solutions
- Designed the system architecture and the API structure
- Designed the PostGIS data model, linking each parcel's geometry to its owners, valuations and payments
- Built the React and Leaflet GIS map of project parcels
- Built compensation and resettlement tracking for each affected person
- Implemented grievance management and reporting
Challenges
- Linking map geometry to the legal and financial record of each parcel, so the map and the case file never disagree
- Tracking compensation and resettlement per person, where an error falls on a family rather than a spreadsheet
- Keeping grievances visible until they are resolved, across field visits and handovers between officials