Self-preparation of property registration documents will only be a click away soon for the public as the kerala government is all set to come up with document templates that will be readily available for various types of registrations. The public can easily use them to generate their own documents at their houses for registration instead of depending on document writers.
The latest decision has been taken in a joint meeting of revenue and registration and cooperation ministers held last month. The joint meeting decided to issue multiple templates for 19 types of document registrations, including sale of property, partition, partnership, settlement, power of attorney, etc.
Even though an order was issued in 2016, according to which registration documents can be prepared by the public themselves, the liberty to do so was not being used by the public because of the numerous corrections required on such documents and the public not willing to invest so much time and effort on them.
As per the government statistics, out of more than 10 lakh documents registered last year, only 0.15% were prepared by the public themselves. However, the document templates which will be available online are expected to be a game-changer. The templates would allow the public to use the same pattern set for a particular type of registration repeatedly without any change except while filling the mandatory fields.
Meanwhile, the government has also come up with the decision to allow e-stamping for denominations up to Rs 1 lakh as well from April 1 this year, which was earlier applicable for stamp denominations above Rs 1 lakh only. The e-stamps are computer generated alternatives for the conventional stamp papers, which however, is still limited only for stamp vendors only.
Though during the last LDF government, the government had come up with a provision for generating e-stamps for the public as well, it was withdrawn owing to the intense protests from the stamp vendor associations. At present there are only 900-odd stamp vendor licensees in the state as the government had stopped issuing the licences since 2012.
Once the licences are not required to generate e-stamped papers, the citizens can generate the stamp papers themselves without approaching the stamp vendors. The government is at present, spending Rs 100 crore every year, of which Rs 60 crore is spent on purchasing the stamps and Rs 40 crore as the commission for the vendors.
With the stamp paper generation and the documents getting printed at the user end, the intermediaries would be eliminated and the property registrations are expected to become transparent. Giving more leeway to the effort towards this goal, the Centre had last year brought an amendment in the Information Technology Act, under which the registration documents which were not part of the digital versions which are recognized at par with their physical equivalents, have also been included under its ambit.
