Registration reform must move beyond procedure to protect ownership

Digitisation and efficiency are welcome. But without statutory safeguards and system integration, land registration risks legitimising flawed transactions

India’s attempt to modernise its property registration framework through the Draft Registration Bill, 2025, is both timely and necessary. Replacing the colonial-era Registration Act, 1908, the draft promises a digital, paperless, and citizen-friendly regime. Online workflows, electronic documentation, and time-bound service delivery signal a clear shift towards efficiency and transparency.

Yet, for all its procedural ambition, the draft law sidesteps more fundamental questions: who has the right to transact, what is being transacted, and on what basis. By focusing on how transactions are recorded rather than on who is entitled to transact, the reform risks modernising the process without addressing legitimacy.

At the heart of the problem lies a long-standing principle-that registration is a formal act, not a verification of title. A system that does not distinguish between legitimate and questionable claims treats all transactions alike. While administratively convenient, this “neutrality” imposes heavy downstream costs on citizens and the State.

Registering Officers ensure proper execution and authenticate parties but do not examine ownership. The Draft Bill retains this philosophy. As a result, even defective or disputed claims can pass through a digitised system and acquire the appearance of legality. Technology enhances speed, not the integrity of underlying transactions. Without safeguards, it risks accelerating the registration of flawed or fraudulent transfers.

Even where the draft proposes integration with land records, it stops short of requiring alignment between the seller and the current recorded landholder. A simple system-level validation-matching the transacting party with the latest record-could filter out a significant number of questionable transactions. Its absence is a missed opportunity.

This gap is particularly visible in the continued vulnerability of public lands. Categories such as ceiling surplus land, commons, forest lands, and unsurveyed tracts remain prone to encroachment and fraudulent transfers. Once registered, such transactions acquire a veneer of legality that is difficult to undo.

The issue reflects a deeper structural problem. India’s land governance remains fragmented across three silos-registration records, transactions, revenue records reflect possession, and courts adjudicate title. While the draft law improves interoperability, it falls short of substantive integration. Digitisation without integration risks reinforcing these compartments rather than bridging them.

For citizens, this translates into costly due diligence, dependence on legal intermediaries, and prolonged litigation. Conflicting claims can coexist across databases, leaving resolution to courts. The system records documents, not claims, and places the burden of verification on buyers.

What is needed is not a shift to full title adjudication at the registration stage but a calibrated move towards basic claim validation. This can be achieved without overburdening the system. A pragmatic middle path lies in introducing a limited, document-based pre-registration filter through statutory design.

Past attempts by States to regulate questionable registrations-often through executive instructions-have faced judicial scrutiny. As seen in Samiullah vs State of Bihar, administrative measures cannot exceed the parent statute. In the absence of legislative backing, pre-registration scrutiny mechanisms remain vulnerable. This is not merely a policy gap but a legislative one.

The Draft Registration Bill presents an opportunity to address this through a carefully crafted statutory intervention-possibly via a dedicated chapter on immovable property transactions, akin to proposed provisions for specific instruments such as wills.

Such a framework could rest on three pillars. To begin with, a self-certification requirement for the seller, mandating disclosure of the legal basis of his right to transact. This could involve citing an official record-such as a mutation entry, Record of Rights, municipal holding, or any document notified by the State. The Registering Officer’s role would remain procedural-ensuring that the declaration is furnished, not adjudicating its correctness.

Second, the creation of a negative or protected list of lands-such as ceiling surplus land, commons, forest land, ecologically sensitive zones, and unsurveyed tracts-drawn from departmental databases. Registrations involving such categories could be restricted or flagged for higher scrutiny.

Third, providing a statutory mandate for system integration across registration, revenue, municipal, and forest databases. With appropriate technological interfaces, sellers not linked to any recognised database could be automatically filtered out, reducing the risk of fraudulent transactions.

Together, these measures would introduce light-touch yet effective pre-registration filters. They would not convert registration into title adjudication, nor impose unreasonable burdens on officials. Instead, they would create a basic layer of traceability, accountability, and deterrence.

Such safeguards would strengthen the evidentiary value of registered documents, create a clearer linkage between the seller and the property, and provide courts with a more reliable trail of claims. The requirement of disclosure-backed by penalties for false declarations-would also deter frivolous or malicious transactions.

Importantly, this approach respects federal diversity. Land record systems vary widely across States in structure and reliability. The law should therefore remain flexible in nature, allowing States to notify acceptable records and adapt mechanisms to local conditions.

While no system can eliminate disputes entirely, such reforms would significantly reduce avoidable ones. More crucially, they would enhance trust in the registration system-transforming it from a passive recorder of documents into an active enabler of legal certainty.

The challenge today is not merely to make registration faster or more efficient. It is to ensure that it is credible, connected, and legally robust. With the right statutory design, the new Registration Act can rise to that challenge.

The challenge today is not merely to make registration faster or more efficient. It is to ensure that it is credible, connected, and legally robust

The writer is an ex-IAS officer and is presently Chairman, RERA Bihar. He served as Principal Secretary, Department of Revenue and Land Reforms, Bihar; Views presented are personal.