WHETHER the new millennium begins in 2000 or 2001, the Land Registration Authority (LRA) will enter it under a fully computerized land title registration system.

LRA aims to run a speedy, efficient paperless processing of transactions, secure land records, and allow automated trace back of title history, thereby preserving the integrity of land titles in this country.

This was underscored by LRA Administrator Alfredo R. Enriquez as agency officials and rank-and-file personnel appeared excited over the coming public bidding on its computerization program.

It will really change their style of serving the public.

This afternoon, in what perhaps is a first-ever ceremony of its kind, the LRA holds a public session in its multipurpose hall during which prequalified international bidders submit their financial and technical documents with one resolve--garner the multimillion-dollar LRA land titling computerization program.

The program hatched under the previous administration, was given a hard push by the LRA under the Estrada administration despite opposition, even sneers, from some quarters. Enriquez, executive presiding judge and former prosecutor before his appointment to the LRA, called it, once carried out on a nationwide network, the agency's ''most important milestone'' in its checkered 96-year history.

On hand as witnesses to the LRA stepping on the threshold of its revolutionary technological stage will be Executive Secretary Ronaldo Zamora as personal representative of President Estrada; House Speaker Manuel Villar, Senate Majority Floor Leader Franklin M. Drilon and Senators Aquilino Pimentel and Robert Barbers, and Ombudsman Aniano Desierto. Justice Secretary Serafin Cuevas, under whose department the LRA functions, is expected to check in early as a beaming father to a newborn.

Recording the LRA's historic bid for modernization for the public will be members of the press, print and broadcast.

Okay, the project won't take off just like that. It will be a massive undertaking, putting up an information technology infrastructure to create a nationwide network of land title offices, enabling seamless information access, transfer and exchange among and between the LRA central office, 15 regional registries of deeds and 157 registries of deeds.

In scope and magnitude of public service and endless potential for new customer services and products, the LRA project beats the handful of other government agencies going into similar IT programs.

Also, the bidding itself won't be finished today. Flashback: Last year, the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) confirmed the project after it was endorsed by the investment coordination committee and the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) Center. It will be a build-own-operate (BOO) scheme.

At the initial call for bidders, 32 international prospective bidders bought prequalification documents from the LRA. Then, 12 parties submitted prequalification documents and requested for short-listing. Eight prequalified and these will be the same parties that will turn in financial and technical proposals today.

Today, the LRA prequalification, bids and awards committee, with the assistance of representatives and experts from the National Computer Center and other offices, will at once open the technical proposals of each bidder to determine if these are complete in compliance with the previous checklist of documents.

The technical proposals of each proponent will be evaluated by government experts on from Oct. 19 to Nov. 17. The following day, Nov. 18, the LRA will notify those whose technical proposals have passed the evaluation.

Their financial proposals will then be opened in public on Nov. 22. The bidder that has submitted the lowest bid based on the present value of tolls or proposed fees to be imposed by the proponents for services, will win the bidding. On Jan. 10, LRA will issue a notice of award to the winning bidder.