The Haryana revenue department has resumed land registries after 40 days, when it had to be stopped following multiple complaints of illegal registries. The government has created a digital database of available land in the state, where a buyer can access all information related to a particular property, such as an ongoing dispute or pending dues, if any.
Under the new Haryana Land Records Information System (HALRIS), a buyer first needs to acquire an online no-objection certificate from the department of town and country planning (DTCP) before going ahead with the registry. This is a crucial feature as most of the illegal registries in the past three months were done without the DTCP’s approval.
The new system has all the records of government land or plots acquired by it. A database of land owned by the forest department or falling in a controlled area — like in Bandhwari where an Aravali hill was flattened to build a road to an illegal colony of farmhouses — has also been fed into the system.
The new digital platform has enough room for issuing alerts to a buyer to tread cautiously. If a land chosen by the buyer is already owned or acquired by the government, the system will not allow him/her to go ahead with the process. In case a land falls in a controlled area, the district town planner will get a notification soon after a buyer has applied for registry. If the town planner gives the approval, the buyer will get a number, which he/ she needs to feed into the system to generate an online NOC.
After a buyer has secured the online NOC, he or she will have to visit the tehsil office to proceed further with the registry process. Earlier, the entire procedure was physical — a buyer needed to visit the office even for an NOC.
“The new system is aimed at plugging all holes in the land registry process,” district revenue officer Basti Ram said.
For private land in the Aravali region, a buyer who has secured the online NOC will also get a list of restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court on construction. “If any land is owned by a private individual and comes under sections 4 and 5 of the PLPA Act, we cannot stop its sale or purchase. Registry will be allowed for such land, but the buyer will also be made aware of the restrictions on construction,” a forest department official said. He added that the move would discourage people from buying land in protected areas, and if anyone did so, he/she could not claim to be ignorant about the restrictions.
Deputy commissioner Amit Khatri said the new registry system will take time to sink in. “People would need at least a week to understand how it works,” he added.
On Tuesday, only two or three registries were executed in Gurgaon. The district sees about 300 registries on usual days.
