Government Plans e-Courts and Land Records Linking

The government plans to link e-courts with registration bases and land records for helping genuine buyers to know if the land has any legal dispute. The government implements the e-courts project in the district and subordinate courts to computerise the district and subordinate courts in the country. 

The litigants and lawyers can obtain several online services like case status, court orders and cause list through e-courts. Furthermore, with the linking of e-courts and land records, the buyers can search the land details of the land they propose to buy on the e-courts services and know if there is any case on the proposed property.

The integration of land records with e-courts will help in the speedy disposal of property disputes. Maharashtra, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh have completed the pilot project linking e-courts with the registration database and land records.  

The Department of Justice, Ministry of Law and Justice has requested the Registrar General of all the High Courts to give clearance to the State Governments to integrate registration databases and land with e-courts and the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG).  

The Department of Justice stated that eight High Courts, i.e. Tripura, Rajasthan, Arunachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Himachal Pradesh, responded to the request of linking e-courts with land records and registration databases. 

As per the Department of Justice, easy and transparent registration of the property is one of the evaluation parameters by the World Bank to assess the performance of 190 worldwide economies for the Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) Index.

The Department of Justice noted that the Department of Land Resources (DoLR), the nodal department responsible for registering property indexes, earned just 3.5 marks against the total weightage of 13 marks for the quality of Land Administration Index. Therefore, the linking of e-courts with land records will help to improve the quality of the Land Administration Index by making the land registrations transparent.

The Supreme Court of India has put up a committee to link e-courts with land records and registration databases to create a conducive eco-system and ease land registrations. The logic behind linking e-courts and land records is that when the status of any land or property is made available on the public domain, it will transparently guide the buyer while registering the property. 

The linking of e-courts with land records will help dispute containment as the buyers can avoid buying a property in dispute or litigation. In addition, it will help to reduce fraudulent transactions and clogging of the court’s system. It will also bring out transparency in land registrations. Before registering the property or land, the buyers will know if the property’s title deeds are under any dispute or litigation. 

For any clarifications/feedback on the topic, please contact the writer at mayashree.acharya@cleartax.in