Property is theft, someone said. Property is, in fact, liable for theft since elaborate documentation has only made it that much easier.
Urban property records in and around Bangalore city are a veritable Pandora’s box. The same property — government land at that — being allotted to more than one person is not an aberration. A property described as agricultural land in Bangalore Rural district is listed as a commercial complex in Bangalore Urban district records. There are instances of khatas being flaunted by people who are not the property owners.
The revenue department has unearthed a huge racket where the same property figures in both urban and rural land records. The modus operandi is simple: create a khata after removing the property ID in rural records.
“The fundamental flaw is that there is absolutely no integration of urban and rural land records. The rule is that if there is an RTC — Record of Rights, Tenancy and Crop Register (RTC) or Pahani as it is known, there cannot be a khata. But we found thousands of such properties. Since urban land records are still largely manual, manipulation is easy,'' official sources told TOI.
The department has also unearthed cases of inherited properties having no proper ownership. “There are many siblings but one of them has claimed ownership and has even sold the property to the third party. The buyer has been cheated as the seller was not the absolute owner of the property. This has happened across all revenue pockets. We want to clean this up by ordering an investigation into every such property and link the rightful owner,” the sources said.
The department hopes that the proposed Unique Property Records (UPR) programme, which is the urban replication of the revolutionary Bhoomi project that computerized land records in rural areas, will wipe out irregularities in urban property documentation.
“Bhoomi showed us how we could check manipulation of land records. The revenue department had so far not bothered much about cleaning up urban property records. From 2002, Bhoomi focused on digitizing the properties in Karnataka’s rural areas. We will now map urban properties on the same lines. Once the Urban Property Records come into picture, there will be no parallel database and fictitious documents cannot be created. A unified property identity document will be issued to all urban property owners and will be accepted by all agencies. The municipalities can bank on the data we create,” revenue secretary Rajeev Chawla told TOI.
THE CLEAN-UP ACT
The Urban Property Records project will be taken up on a pilot basis in 55 wards and cover four lakh properties. “The project will be taken up on a private public partnership basis. It will take off in January 2012. Both government and private properties in all these wards will be first surveyed. A title enquiry will be called for and the property owners must come forward and submit related documents to prove their ownership. We will open service centres for the public. A unique property number will be issued to each of the properties,” revenue secretary Rajeev Chawla said.
HOW WILL IT WORK?
Revenue department will survey each and every property — both government and private. The department will call for a title enquiry where all the documents possessed by the ‘owner’ must be produced.
“Yes, there are chances of more than one person claiming the ownership of the same property. We will scrutinize every document and issue the document of unique property number to the one who has genuine records to claim ownership,'' officials said.
KEEP THESE READY
• If you have bought a site allotted from BDA, you must submit documents such as your application to BDA for the allotment of the site, the sale deed, the letter of allotment from BDA and tax-paid receipts and encumbrance certificate, if any. If the BDA site has been sold to you, then the sale deed between the seller and buyer must be shown.
• If it is an inherited property, then family chart, encumbrance certificate, the will documents and possession certificate must be submitted.
• If you have purchased a site in a private layout, show the documents of site allotment, sale deed, documents to prove land conversion, land acquisition, encumbrance certificate and any related documents.
CHECK BEFORE YOU BUY
Buyers must cross-check whether the seller is authorized to sell the said property. Most civil suits are due to multiple ownership claims on the property.
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