Informatics-April 2008

Lead Story Informatics, April 2008
Digital Initiatives for Property Registration -
e-governance towards Social Empowerment
Property Registration
involves recording a copy of
a document and transferring
the title in immovable
property to the office of the
Registrar. The manual
process is time consuming
and used to frequently lead
to errors and misplacement
of documents. So, in order to
make the process citizen
friendly, fast and free of
errors, many states have
chosen the ICT route and
introduced online
registration of property.
Vinay Thakur,
Technical Director,
NIC HQ
vinay@nic.in
The State Department of Registration
& Stamps is entrusted with the
responsibility of registration and
recording of various types of
documents related to the transfer of
immovable property. Each Sub-
Registrar (SR) registers around 30-40
documents every day. At present,
there are around 4000 SR offices in
the country that indulge in activities
such as sale of stamps, registration of
documents, search of documents and
other important activities. Though
detailed information about functions
and working procedures of the
systems are as per Registration Act,
1908, the State Governments are
authorised to make certain rules and
procedures as per State Registration
Manuals. The State Government fixes
stamp duty and circle rates. The
manual process involves maintenance
of paper copy of all the registered
documents in the large record rooms,
which act as the repository of all
documents. Further, the manual
procedure of maintaining and
registering property documents costs
heavily to the Registration
A typical Registration Record Room
Department due to misclassification
of documents, mis-representation of
facts and other such losses. Searching
of Reports, Records and issuance of
C e r t i f i c a t e c o p i e s a n d N o n
Encumbrance Certificates take long
time and turns out to be a cumbersome
task since it is done manually.
Computerisation – the need of the
hour
Lately a few states have taken
initiatives in computerising the needbased
functions. However, in order to
offer exemplary citizen services, all
macro and micro level issues need to
be addressed. This is possible through
optimal use of ICT. The immediate
requirements of Registration
Department are:
(a) On line availability of deed
formats.
(b) Guidance values should be made
a v a i l a b l e o n w e b ; a n d
p e r i o d i c a l l y u p d a t e d f o r
calculation of stamp duty.
(c) Abolition of use of stamp
papers; stamp duty
payments through banks
should be the part of the
system.
(d) The entire process of
r e g i s t r a t i o n t o b e
completed in a short time
(30 minutes), including
scanning of deeds and
generation of reports.
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