Deputy Prime Minister Hồ Quốc Dũng speaks during the meeting on Wednesday. — VNA/VNS Photo

HÀ NỘI — Some provinces and cities are falling short of targets to digitise their sprawling land registry, Deputy Prime Minister Hồ Quốc Dũng said on Wednesday, ordering a round-the-clock push to get the effort back on track before a year-end deadline.

Chairing a review meeting in Hà Nội, Deputy PM Dũng said that while ministries and provincial governments had made efforts to implement Directive 05, a February order mandating the completion of a unified national land database by the end of 2026, progress across the board remained slow.

"There will be no delay to the timeline," Dũng said, directing all agencies to accelerate implementation and warning against progress reports that describe work as merely 'done' or 'ongoing' without measurable outcomes.

The scale of the challenge is considerable. Before Directive 05 took effect, Việt Nam had roughly 106 million land parcels nationwide, according to a report from the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment.

Of those, about 62.8 million had some form of digital records, but only 23.5 million fully met the Government's data quality standard, described as 'accurate, complete, clean and live'.

Since the directive was issued on February 13, local governments have processed an additional 500,000 parcels to that standard, bringing the total to just over 24 million.

All 34 provinces and cities have synchronised their land records with the ministry's database, covering roughly 62.4 million parcels.

But the remaining workload is daunting. About 38.4 million parcels have records that fall short of the quality threshold and need to be updated and verified, including some 20 million where land-use rights holders must be cross-checked against the national population database.

Another 43.2 million parcels have no digital data at all and will require fresh cadastral surveys and mapping.

The senior government official ordered a 'day-and-night campaign' to clean up and validate the 38-million-parcel backlog by the end of June. For the larger group requiring new surveys, he set a target of substantially completing the work by the third quarter of 2026, with a full assessment in the fourth quarter.

He directed the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment to review all 19 assigned tasks under the directive, publish detailed monthly progress schedules and submit biweekly reports directly to his office. Responsibility must be pinned to specific agencies, individuals, and deadlines, he said, with measurable deliverables at each stage.

The Deputy PM also flagged the risk of technological fragmentation, warning that if each province and city deployed its own software and data standards, the result would be a patchwork system that cannot be integrated nationally, wasting resources and creating operational headaches down the line. Technology firms involved in the project must adhere to unified technical standards, he said.

Representatives from Hà Nội, HCM City and Đà Nẵng told the meeting their cities would meet a key June 30 milestone to connect local land databases to the national system.

HCM City, which manages more than 4.2 million parcels following a recent data consolidation, said roughly 3.8 million had already been reviewed and largely cleared for quality. The city committed to completing the remaining spatial and attribute data layers by June 30.

Hà Nội, with nearly 4.2 million parcels spread across about 335,000ha, said roughly 49 per cent of its highest-quality data tier was already connected to the national database. The city said it was still reconciling records for more than 1.1 million parcels and aimed to finish before the end of June.

Đà Nẵng acknowledged it still had work to do in 64 of its 94 communes, more than two-thirds of its total workload, covering roughly 2 million parcels. The city said it had reorganised its implementation plan in late March, held commune-level briefings and launched a public campaign to get residents to help verify and sign off on their property boundaries.

Beyond simply building the database, Dũng said the ultimate measure of success was whether ordinary citizens could feel the difference. He said he had received complaints that data across land, notary and tax systems remained siloed, forcing people to bring stacks of the same documents to multiple agencies even when the underlying information already existed in government systems.

"The goal is not just to complete the database; it is to put it to effective use," he said, directing the ministry to quantify reductions in administrative procedures that the new system should enable.

Directive 05, which carries 19 specific tasks assigned to four ministries and all provincial governments, calls for the national land database to be operational by the close of 2026, with records updated in real time to support administrative services and state management. — VNS