Tenders on to begin process at Mysuru South, Mysuru North Offices

Mysuru/Bengaluru: Making property records, deeds and documents available to all, to contain or check property fraud, is one of the key objectives of the Government. The intention of the Government is to computerise all land records, including mutations, improve transparency in the land record maintenance system, digitise maps and surveys, update all settlement records and minimise the scope of land disputes.

Digitisation would provide clear titles of land ownership that could be monitored easily by Government officials, to facilitate quicker transactions. Moreover, digitisation is an effective means to prevent fraud.

As a step in the direction of digitisation, all the property records of Mysuru North and Mysuru South Sub-Registrar Offices will be digitised. These two offices figure among the list of 29 Sub-Registrar Offices that the State Government has chosen to digitise property records.

The 29 offices have been chosen for the project that was announced in the State Budget presented by CM Basavaraj Bommai. Under the project, all existing property records up to 2004 will be scanned and digitised and a budget of Rs. 10 crore has been sanctioned.

Notably, all the property records in Karnataka from 2003 such as Encumbrance Certificates (ECs), are already available in digital format.

Awaiting directive: In Mysuru, the Mysuru North Sub-Registrar Office is located at Mini Vidhana Soudha and the Mysuru South Sub-Registrar Office is located at Ramakrishnanagar. Speaking to Star of Mysore, Mysuru North Sub-Registrar Kiran said that the communication from the Government to digitise land records has  not reached them yet. “So far we have no communication regarding that and if the North Sub-Registrar Office indeed figures among the 29 Offices, then the Government order will be implemented after going through the procedure,” he said.

Mysuru South Sub-Registrar Yashaswini Janardhan          too said that the communication from the Government is yet to reach them. Sources said that there are 12 crore pages of legacy records spread across 253 Sub-Registrar Offices in Karnataka and Karnataka was the first State in India to computerise land records, under the ‘Bhoomi Project’.

A complete computerised compilation of land data, starting from the original owner to the present status of the land, including an image of the property and the landowner for identification purposes, will reveal the total area of land owned by a person.

Process involved: Once the legacy land records are identified, all the handwritten records that are stored in large volumes at the 29 Sub-Registrar Offices will be digitised and the process starts with scanning of the documents. After scanning, the metadata will be entered and uploaded onto the website so that whoever searches for the records in the relevant platforms can electronically access them.  Later, the digital land record database will be synced with the digitised land registration database, sources added.

The tender process to digitise property records is underway and sources said that the oldest living property record belongs to the erstwhile Princely State of Mysore. Transparency through digitisation will make it difficult for the property owners to evade taxes and at the same time, it will enable transactions that are transparent. Digitisation will offer the correct details of the owner of a particular property and the buyer can also check if the land is under litigation.