Landed, but not documented

Property owners in the newly added BBMP areas are awaiting clarity on their land

As if that was not enough, in the vast expanse of the City’s new BBMP areas, land documentation is an invitation to chaos, confusion and is an unchecked playground for frauds of all kinds.  

Fearing land sharks, citizens want their properties protected. But in their rush to do that, they often fall prey to conmen, adept at fabricating documents, falsifying survey numbers and every other trick in the real estate trade. And if you expected the Government to check such crimes, kiss the thought goodbye. The issue of khatha is a major problem, particularly for the residents of the new BBMP areas. ‘Khatha’, the identification number of properties registered with the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) have plagued the citiz­ens for nearly a decade. With the City’s expansion, the complexities of Khatha have only multiplied. 
Site owners who had their revenue land converted by the Deputy Commissioner (DC) from agriculture land to non-agriculture purposes had a relatively easy transition to the BBMP fold. Of course, they had to register their properties with the now abolished civic authorities before the areas were brought under the Palike. But for the others, it has been a nightmare.  In 2007, the BBMP had brought under its fold seven City Municipal Corporations (CMC) and a Town Municipal Corporation (TMC), apart from 110 villages. It also added nearly 10 lakh additional properties, increasing the possibilities of revenue generation manifold for the Palike. To tap this vast catchment of revenue, the BBMP began advertising a ‘B’ register to draw property taxes from site owners who were to be extended the civic amenities, but had not been part of the BBMP earlier. It was more of a property identification register than anything else.  However, over the years, the ‘B’ register has been mistaken to be a ‘B’ Khatha. Such was the demand for the receipt of an entry in the property identification register that officials in the BBMP started to extract huge sums of money as bribes to provide a non-existent ‘B’ khatha to citizens.  Last week, at the recently concluded monthly meeting of the Council, BBMP Commissioner Siddaiah hit the nail on the head. 
“There is no such thing as ‘B’ khatha. It is bogus,” he said, sending shockwaves across the new BBMP areas, where many have paid huge bribes to get what they “assumed” were khathas.  “People get confused over the fact that a khatha can be given only on the basis of a title deed. But a title deed cannot be given on a khatha,” explains BBMP Deputy Commissioner (Revenue) Ramakanth. Property owners, he says, were under the misconception that this was the real deal and were in fact registering their properties at the sub-registrar’s office based on property tax receipts.  “The ‘B’ khatha does not exist on paper. Let the Revenue Department show us that such a khatha exists. It is the people who have been showing the property tax receipts as the khatha transaction between the Palike and themselves at the sub-registrar’s offices,” he says.
Ramakanth asserts that the khatha is nothing more than a supporting document to the title deed. Yet, there are an estimated two lakh properties on revenue sites in the new BBMP areas that survive on the ‘B’ register.   
Officers of the BBMP blame the erstwhile CMCs, TMCs and other municipal bodies for creating a mess out of the khatha system.
There has been rampant and unabated issue of building plan sanctions without verifying the property documents. “Most of the files from the erstwhile municipal bodies are yet to be sorted out for the BBMP to ascertain which ones are genuine and which ones require approvals from competent development boards or authorities,” explains a BBMP official on condition of anonymity. The Palike had made an attempt to issue permanent khathas by regularising sites converted by the deputy commissioner. But this effort has met with little success. Only about 400 properties have been registered, after the Palike collected betterment charges in exchange for permanent khathas. Reason: Most people who have bought a ‘Deputy Commissioner converted’ site cannot afford to pay the steep betterment fee. “We are aware that a ‘B’ khatha does not mean anything for the property to be registered in my name. However, the betterment charge for receiving a permanent khatha is too high for us to afford,” says Armugam, a member of the Ramamurthy Nagar Residents’ Welfare Association.  There could be some respite in the future for owners of revenue sites surviving without a DC conversion and who have only a ‘B’ registration number. Last month, the State legislature had approved a proposal for the regularisation of revenue land without appropriate sanctions from any land development agency.   For the citizen struggling to get a permanent khatha is, this would mean he can pay the conversion charges at the Deputy Commissioner’s office after which he can apply for the khatha by paying the betterment charges. The Palike believes that the charges can fetch if huge sums of revenue, if people agree to pay the dues. But for the present, it remains an uphill task for the BBMP to clear the confusion about the ‘B’ khatha and the ‘B’ register. A serious effort would be required to tell people that there is no such thing as a ‘B’ khatha. 
Further, the onus is also on the people to prove that they are the actual owners of the property, before obtaining a khatha from the civic agency. But the critical point to be stressed is that a khatha can only be extracted on a title deed and cannot be considered as being a title deed by itself. Unless this clarity is achieved, confusion would remain and the ‘B’ khatha would continue to be a source for greedy officials to make some fast bucks.