The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)

Bill to set up urban land, property records authority in works in Delhi

IN A FIRST, the Union Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry is working on a Bill to create an urban land and immovable property records system — covering all urban lands, buildings, apartments, and flats — for Delhi with an authority to be headed by the Lieutenant-Governor, The Indian Express has learnt.

The Delhi Urban Land and Immovable Property Records, Bill, 2024 that will cover all notified urban areas and apartments is a work in progress, said sources. At present, Delhi does not have an Act for the management of urban land records, officials added.

As of now, the Delhi government’s Revenue Department maintains the record of rights ( ROR), which contains all informatio­n about a land parcel like its ownership and extent, for villages. The Municipal Corporatio­n of Delhi ( MCD) and the New Delhi Municipal Council ( NDMC) maintain property tax records for their respective areas. The Delhi Developmen­t Authority ( DDA) maintains records for the land acquired by it, and the Land and Developmen­t Office ( L& DO) of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs ( MOHUA) manages the lands acquired by the central government when New Delhi was set up in 1911 and rehabilita­tion colonies. The draft Bill proposes to set up the Delhi Urban Land and Immovable Property Records Authority, which will be chaired by the Delhi L- G and will include as members officials from the DDA, MCD, NDMC, Delhi Cantonment Board, the L& DO and the Delhi government’s Revenue Department.

The authority would be able to notify urban areas for the preparatio­n of records and appoint officers. The draft Bill provides for a survey of urban land and immovable property for the preparatio­n of records and inquiry into property rights. The Bill also provides for a penalty under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, for wilfully concealing informatio­n or deliberate­ly giving false informatio­n to an officer, it is learnt. In Delhi, there are multiple authoritie­s involved. Land records, currently, come under the ambit of two Acts – The Delhi Land Reforms Act, 1954 and The Punjab Land Revenue Act, 1887. The DLR, 1954 does not apply to land owned by a municipal agency, Cantonment, the Central Government or acquired for public purposes. The agricultur­al land records include details of khasra ( list of fields) and khatauni ( list of cultivator­s).

Some states have amended their land records Acts to apply these to urban areas, but courts have interprete­d that the DLR doesn’t apply once a village in Delhi is declared urbanised, a senior government official said. Since the existing framework doesn't apply in Delhi, there is a vacuum when it comes to urban land records, the official added. “With no single custodian for the NCT of Delhi, there are no uniform records across various governance and planning typologies; varying formats are followed within as well as across institutio­ns, making the process of property title search extremely cumbersome,” as per a 2019 policy paper based on a study by the Indian Institute for Human Settlement­s. It added that clear and comprehens­ive records would make taxation and dispute resolution easier.

In its manifesto for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP promised, “We will undertake the creation of the Digital Urban Land Records System.” Sources say the draft Bill is along the same lines, as it will lead to the creation of digital records. NITI Aayog, in its report on Reforms in Urban Planning Capacity in India in September 2021, flagged the importance of land records for planning.