Sale deeds of property deals go missing
Dept Officials Clueless About Exact Number
Yogesh.Kabirdoss@timesgroup.com
Chennai:05.02.2019
Sale deeds of property deals registered in the 1960s and 1980s are missing from the record rooms of the registration department across the state, though no one yet knows how many. Officials stumbled upon this while digitizing land documents of more than 140 years, from 1865.
Till a decade ago, sub registrar offices maintained a hardcopy of every registered property deed; the practice was stopped with the introduction of electronic scanning of documents in 2009.
Officials said they expected to get a count of the missing documents once the digitization is completed. As part of digitization, each page of every document needs to be scanned. That is when some documents were found missing. For instance, said a registration official, who is privy to the developments, in a volume containing details of 100 sale or mortgage deeds that are running in a series, two documents could not be found. “Such missing deeds belong to the periods of 1960s and 1980s,” the official said. The missing documents are not confined to a particular zone in the state either.
“Once the digitization process is completed, we would be asking all the sub registrar offices to send the list of missing documents,” a senior registration department official said, adding that the digitization was scheduled to be completed.
Once the missing documents are listed, sources said, steps would be taken to track the original documents using the details in the index book separately maintained by the sub registrar offices.
“There could be multiple sale transactions pertaining to the property from the year the documents went missing. We are exploring whether some details could be traced from the subsequent registrations,” the official added.
According to registration sources, documents are pilfered from sub registrar offices to forge property deeds. “Original owners can be cheated as name transfers in land pattas can be easily done with forged land deeds,” another official said.
Last year, the registration department embarked on a massive mission to digitize 59 crore papers pertaining to old property documents in 575 sub registrar offices across Tamil Nadu. The documents were registered from 1865 to 2008. So far, two crore pages have been digitized with the government looking at making available to the public all the scanned documents online.
Dept Officials Clueless About Exact Number
Yogesh.Kabirdoss@timesgroup.com
Chennai:05.02.2019
Sale deeds of property deals registered in the 1960s and 1980s are missing from the record rooms of the registration department across the state, though no one yet knows how many. Officials stumbled upon this while digitizing land documents of more than 140 years, from 1865.
Till a decade ago, sub registrar offices maintained a hardcopy of every registered property deed; the practice was stopped with the introduction of electronic scanning of documents in 2009.
Officials said they expected to get a count of the missing documents once the digitization is completed. As part of digitization, each page of every document needs to be scanned. That is when some documents were found missing. For instance, said a registration official, who is privy to the developments, in a volume containing details of 100 sale or mortgage deeds that are running in a series, two documents could not be found. “Such missing deeds belong to the periods of 1960s and 1980s,” the official said. The missing documents are not confined to a particular zone in the state either.
“Once the digitization process is completed, we would be asking all the sub registrar offices to send the list of missing documents,” a senior registration department official said, adding that the digitization was scheduled to be completed.
Once the missing documents are listed, sources said, steps would be taken to track the original documents using the details in the index book separately maintained by the sub registrar offices.
“There could be multiple sale transactions pertaining to the property from the year the documents went missing. We are exploring whether some details could be traced from the subsequent registrations,” the official added.
According to registration sources, documents are pilfered from sub registrar offices to forge property deeds. “Original owners can be cheated as name transfers in land pattas can be easily done with forged land deeds,” another official said.
Last year, the registration department embarked on a massive mission to digitize 59 crore papers pertaining to old property documents in 575 sub registrar offices across Tamil Nadu. The documents were registered from 1865 to 2008. So far, two crore pages have been digitized with the government looking at making available to the public all the scanned documents online.
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