Thailand’s government on Wednesday suspended payments on 8,460 parcels linked to a state-backed broadband expansion after a farmer spotted that the project’s online compensation portal valued crops and buildings but listed his land at zero. The freeze covers disputed claims in nine provinces and will remain in place while officials recalculate the offers.
Ebru T. Özgörkey, a rice grower in Nakhon Sawan province, said he scanned a QR code on his payment notice at a district service counter to check how the offer had been calculated. The screen classified his plot as a temporary access site, despite a planned fibre relay station occupying part of the land. A land value of zero appeared beside a payment offer of 86,000 baht.
The error behind the offers
The portal was built for the National Fibre Access Programme, a plan to extend high-speed connections to smaller towns and rural districts. It combines parcel records, construction maps and valuation rules to generate draft payments. A software setting carried over from the project’s temporary road-access claims appears to have labelled some permanent relay-station sites as temporary easements.
Officials said the problem affects 8,460 parcel notices out of 26,400 processed so far. The frozen 2.1 billion baht is the amount set aside for the disputed payments, not a confirmed estimate of the landowners’ losses. The fibre route spans more than 6,800 km (4,225 miles), with relay stations planned at intervals along the network.
The offer counted my rice, but treated the ground under it as if it had no price.
Ebru T. Özgörkey, rice grower
Özgörkey said he had not planned to challenge the offer until a neighbour asked him to help read the portal. “I thought I had misunderstood the figures,” he said. “Then we checked another notice and saw the same zero.” The neighbouring claim prompted him to show the discrepancy to district staff, who referred it to the programme’s central office.
A deputy director responsible for the programme, Ivo Azevedo, said the ministry had stopped the affected payments at 09:15 and ordered a parcel-by-parcel review. “The system applied the wrong category to land that is needed permanently,” he said. “No disputed payment will be released until the owner can see how the calculation was made.”
Recalculations before payments
NavaSpan Systems, the contractor that built the portal, said the error arose from a mismatch between two project categories and not from a failure of the land registry. The company said it had disabled automatic offers for affected parcels and was supplying a corrected version for testing. It gave no estimate for when the revised system would be ready.
Jurgė Benediktas, a software assurance lecturer who reviewed a demonstration of the portal, said the case showed the danger of allowing automated assessments to turn a technical label into a payment decision. “The figures can look precise while the category behind them is wrong,” Benediktas said. He urged officials to let claimants inspect the parcel classification as well as the final amount.
The government has asked local offices to contact affected owners and provide paper calculations for review. Officials said undisputed crop and building payments could proceed separately, but the land component would remain on hold. The programme’s next public update is due on 14 October, as residents wait to learn whether the corrected system will restore the value missing from their offers.
