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Digitized Land Registration

5.5  EXISTING LAND REGISTRATION SYSTEM

Land registration is a system whereby property rights are recorded and evidence

is maintainedin relation to property title holders. In the existing land registration

system:

1. The seller and the buyer are included in the land trade negotiation in the

sale.

2. If the buyer gets a loan from a bank, the seller needs to provide a certificate

stating that the land is not involved in any legal or monetary liabilities.

3. The seller and the buyer get the legal opinion on the prepared sale deed.

4. After the sale deed verification, the stamp duty is paid based on the govern­

ment’s guidelines to the treasury, and stamp paper is bought.

5. The sale deed is signed by both the seller and the buyer when the agreed

amount is paid to the seller by the buyer.

6. After validation and verification, the sale deed is registered at the Sub

Registraroffice.

Finding the current property holder is challenging among thousands of land records.

Some of the issues in the existing land registry system are:

1. The existing land records are not well maintained and are ambiguous.

Compared with reality, there are discrepancies in the recorded data.

2. Before sealing the transaction, the submitted documents need to be veri­

fied. For the verification process, a team is required to verify the authentic­

ity of the submitteddocuments.

3. The existing land registry system has time-consuming processes.

4. Chance of human error.

5. Failure to detect forgery.

6. The system is not available to keep track of the credit on the land.

7. A third party’s involvement.

8. There may be a chance for hiding and manipulating details during

registration.

Major challenges in the existing land registry system are:

1. Intrusion by brokers and middlemen

Brokers and middlemen are an integral part of the land registration

system who know more about market offerings. Sellers and buyers pre­

fer to call the brokers and middlemen for their side process completion.

Middlemen or brokers gather the required information from traders, lend­

ers, intermediaries, etc., which leads to additional costs, making the entire

land registry system an expensive system(Singh et​.a​l, 2020).

2. Number of fraud cases