Get 'Bangalored' , learn from the neighbour

CHENNAI: On Friday, Angu Raj of Sriperumbudur lodged a complaint with the suburban Chennai police that the lottery king S Martin of Coimbatore had grabbed his land. The land which had been mortgaged by the complainant’s father to a bank had allegedly been sold by the brother of the father, creating a chain of land transfers ending with Martin. The complainant wonders how despite the documents being in the custody of a bank the land was sold to another person.
A key problem in land transactions is that owners do not possess absolute titles for the pieces of property, says a senior official. As a result, the same property can potentially be sold by another person to a third party. And this is an endemic issue—a problem not just in Tamil Nadu but in many other states, says Rajeev Chawla, a revenue secretary with the government of Karnataka. Chawla spearheaded the e-bhoomi project which computerised and created an online database of all rural lands specifying original titles in that state.
Currently, he is heading the Urban Property Ownership Record (UPOR) in five towns in Karnataka including Mysore, Hubli-Dharwad, Bellary and Shimoga. Santosh Babu, IT secretary to the government of Tamil Nadu, says the national land records modernisation project has the aim of giving original titles to all land owners, and Tamil Nadu is a party to the project.
He says that now, in Tamil Nadu, computerisation has been introduced piece-meal for several applications, such as the sub-registrar office for encumbrance certificate. It is a question of having one single software platform that will link all departments dealing with land, he adds. Chawla says the following lessons learned in Karnataka may be useful for Tamil Nadu. While computerization in itself will stop forgery, meddling of data and so on, in Karnataka, no rural land registration is now allowed unless the sale deed has a “pre-mutation sketch” that clearly establishes through a drawing the area to be purchased.
Also, the government now offers a service through which a buyer or seller could get a certificate saying that the government has no objection to the transaction. This, he explains, brings much certainty to land transactions. “Another lesson is that a seller of a rural land can execute a sale deed only if it is established by the bhoomi database that he owns it,” he says.
Chawla also describes the UPOR project, which started a year and half back and will complete in six months. In urban lands, unlike in rural, clear ownership data and titles are not available. So starting with data collected from various government sources, such as urban development authorities and city survey deparments, current titles are arrived at.
Owners are encouraged to establish their ownership following which titles will be declared. This will cost a little over `400 for the owner—but the potential benefits are many. For instance, any building permission, loan application and so on will be based on UPOR records, Chawla says. The UPOR project after covering 9.5 lakh properties in the towns will soon move to the big fish—Bangalore that holds over 18 lakh properties. A senior official in Tamil Nadu IT department says that such a project to give original titles to all lands can be completed in two years if the state starts now.