DNA: Mumbai: Monday,
07 September 2015.
The department of registration and stamps is faced
with a problem of plenty, literally! It has on its hands almost 3 lakh
documents some of them over three decades old relating to transactions like
sale and purchase of property, which have not been collected by people after
they were registered. These documents, which also consist of papers for
properties across India, have piled up over a period of time mainly in Mumbai,
Pune and Thane, and include a massive 1.26 lakh papers in Mumbai city and the
suburbs alone.
Now, faced with a logistical nightmare related to
storing and handling these old, unclaimed documents the department is now
planning to involve a professional agency to preserve and retrieve them.
Earlier, people were allowed to register documents from across India in the
sub-registrar offices in the four Metros (Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai)
and hence, some of these unclaimed documents belong to people from across the
country. "These documents will be properly classified and stored for easy
retrieval," Dr Ramaswami N, Inspector General of Registration and
Controller of Stamps, told dna, adding that they would float a tender to
appoint an agency in this regard. "This will reduce our load and enable
people to get their documents easily. Otherwise, they have to file applications
under the RTI act," said Ramaswami.
"Before 2002, when we had not computerised
our systems, scanning these documents in our photo registry took time,"
noted a senior official, adding that the delay led to a situation where people
did not come forward to claim these documents, which include sale and purchase
deeds and mortgages. "The documents have been stored in our record rooms
in our offices... We are proposing that professional agencies be hired to
handle the storage, maintenance and data entry of these papers. The agency will
store these documents and if people turn up to claim them, we will give them
our consent to release the papers on payment of charges," the official
explained.
The data entry will enable these details to be put
into public domain and enable people to search for them and later claim these
papers.
The official said they had also tried to send
documents to the claimants by courier. However, this experiment failed as many
of them were not delivered and returned to the department because of the
addressees having changed their place of residence or the building being
demolished or redeveloped. However, because of banks and other institutions
insisting on stringent paperwork for property related transactions, there have
been instances of some people turning up to claim these papers now.
The official admitted that obvious
"gaps" in the system had ensured that the documents were not
delivered to banks despite the purchasers of the property having given their
no-objection certificates (NOCs) in this regard. Ramaswami noted that though
the law mandated that the department could dispose of an unclaimed, registered
document after one year, they had preserved them in public interest.
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