Govt working on land title registration Bill for Delhi

Jan 01,2019

 Govt working on land title registration Bill for Delhi

Tuesday, 01 January 2019 | Rajesh Kumar | New Delhi

In a move to check fraudulent registration and to prevent duplicate sale of the same properties, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (HUA) is working on a land title registration Bill for the national Capital. The Bill will have provisions to provide specific number to each and every property. The new law will form a title registration authority that will maintain all land records electronically.

Union Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said that the HUA Ministry is working on a Land Title Registration Bill for the national Capital. He was responding to a query pertaining to increase of fraudulent registration of properties after the implementation of the Land Pooling Policy in Delhi.

Sources said that a land titling system that would provide unassailable and conclusive proof of ownership of land. For now, there is no central system of maintaining records of property ownership because of multiplicity of authorities.

Under the existing system, after purchasing a property, the owner first gets the sale deed registered with the sub-registrar of his district. He then applies for mutation of the property to get the title of the property transferred in his name.

But since there is no foolproof mechanism for scrutiny, the officials bank on affidavits filed by the owners at the time of registration. But it has been observed that the same property has been registered more than once by different owners.

The Delhi Government had conceived a draft bill of the  Land Titling Bill in 2008. In 2010, the erstwhile Sheila Dikshit government passed a bill “The Delhi Survey, Registration and Recordal of Title of Immovable Properties in Urban Area Bill”, was returned by the Ministry of Home Affairs in 2013. However, with the state going to polls and the uncertain political situation that followed the bill was forgotten.

According to an officials of revenue department just registering your property with the sub-registrar’s office and ensuring that your ownership rights are recorded by land-owning agencies are not enough to safeguard your rights as an owner. It merely gives you possession of the property but not the title.

According to one estimate by a leading Mumbai-based securities firm, 80 percent of the disputes before high courts are ‘civil’ as against ‘criminal’, with the origin being in land ownership. The Government had earlier also launched the National Land Records Modernizing Program (2008) to address the issue of conclusive land titling.