Encumbrance certificates online from next week

Property buyers can download digitally-signed encumbrance certificates (EC) as the Department of Stamps and Registration, after a long delay, will launch the facility in about a week’s time.

The initiative is part of the Sulabha Nondani software, which was announced to make property-related transactions easier. An encumbrance certificate is a record of all registered transactions that have taken place relating to a particular property.

Besides making ECs available online, Sulabha Nondani also proposes online booking of time slots for registration of documents at sub-registrar offices, online generation of deeds and online entry of pre-registration details.

“We will first launch the facility to view and download ECs by paying fees online and generation of certified copies of registered documents. A government order is being issued and the facility will be out in a week’s time,” Inspector-General of Registration and Commissioner of Stamps Manoj Kumar Meena said. The software for this was ready about a year ago and was being tested internally, he added .

 

Other facilities - booking of time slots, generation of deeds (sale, transfer etc) and entry of pre-registration details - will be introduced soon, he added.

Payment of stamp duty and registration fees is already online through Khajane-II, the government’s flagship financial management system.

“Our first priority was to start with the online ECs facility. We see that 70% of people visit sub-registrar offices solely to get ECs. Once this facility is made available, footfalls in the sub-registrar offices will be cut drastically,” Meena said.

Digitised from 2003

The department, he said, has digitised records from 2003 onward. So, property buyers will not be able to virtually access encumbrance details for a property before 2003.

Implementation of the Sulabha Nondani, which was first announced in the 2015-16 budget, got delayed because the department wanted to include anywhere registration and online property registration facilities. The Law department, however, did not concur.

Meena said the department was studying how Maharashtra was able to amend its Act to allow online registration of property without requiring both the seller and buyer to be present at the time. “We will follow the Maharashtra model and send another proposal to the government,” he said.

Online property registration will be a big boost for Karnataka, which slipped in the ease of doing business ranking from 9th position in 2015 to 13th last year.