Maharashtra’s planned land-title registration system, which will be a single-window land ownership authentication mechanism, is what other states need to emulate. Indeed, as per Business Standard, the Maharashtra experiment is the pilot for the national rollout of digitising land title records—Chandigarh moved on conclusive land titling system (CLTS) in 2017, but that was for limited area, where the government knew the titles were clean. Such authentication of titles will boost immovable property transactions since, with the government authenticating the title of a piece of land, the likelihood of fraud or dispute will fall drastically—Maharashtra is proposing strict punitive measures, including heavy fines and even imprisonment, for any attempt to defraud the process by deliberately concealing information or furnishing false information. Once a government-authenticated database of titles is set-up, it will guarantee the rights of both the property owner and the buyer/receiver. Apart from what it means for the real estate market, the new system will be a big boost to infrastructure, where acquisition of massive tracts of land is often held hostage by title disputes. Clean titles and easy authentication will also make financing based on land much smoother.
Though the details of the Maharashtra process are not yet known, it is hoped that it emulates the Chandigarh CLTS that assigns a unique ID number to every piece of land and hands out ownership certificates that contain details on even borrowings against the property. Digitally accessible, government-authenticated land titles would be an unprecedented shot in the arm for the economy. Now, that nearly 90% of the land records (record of rights) in the country have been computerised under the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (DILRMP)—though land records and property registration have been integrated for just 58% of the cases where this is applicable—rolling it out across the country doesn’t seem to be too far in the future. The government can inject some pace in property transactions if it were to stand guarantee for the title—that is, if there is a fraud detected in the title, the government should compensate the buyer for the loss. Professor DC Wadhwa of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics had offered a rationale for this saying that the local government moving to authenticate titles before the rights of the owners are recognised will mean that the chances of fraud are low and the gains to the government from increased transactions—not just from duties on the land/property, but also from taxes on the increase in economic activity such transactions eventually bring about—will offset the costs the government bears. In any case, the Maharashtra provision for fine for fraud will also take up a part of the burden of compensating buyers falling prey to fraud.
As FE has held before, bringing in insurers to provide cover to titles based on the risk attached is also something that states must consider. While users, where records are up-to-date and disputes are minimal, will not mind paying a small premium for the peace of mind the insurance guarantees, those in states where the records have been historically poorly kept will demand better from their governments.
