On May 27, 2025, the Department of Land Resources, Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India, released the draft Registration Bill, 2025 ("Bill"), which seeks to digitize the registration system in India. The Bill is currently open for public comments for a period of 30 (thirty) days, until June 25, 2025. Once enacted, the Bill shall replace the pre-Constitution Registration Act, 1908 (the "Registration Act"), which currently governs the registration process is India.
The Registration Act is currently serving as the governing legislation for the document registration system in India, it was drafted at a time wherein all documents were stored and saved in a printed format. Consequently, it mandates the registration of documents in the physical format and is shaped to accommodate the extended timelines associated with the manual review of property documents. The last couple of decades has seen an increase in the digital storage and processing of a vast majority of important documents. The current framework is not aligned with the modern world of technology, where systems and frameworks are becoming increasingly digital to allow for access and ease of use. By introducing an online, paperless and citizen centric registration system, the Bill aims to enable citizens to carry out the required registration in a smooth and hassle-free manner. This Bill aims to ensure that the land registration procedure followed is in keeping with the recent and prevalent technological advancements.
Since land registration documents are crucial in both public and private transactions, it is essential that the process of registration is robust, efficient, time-effective and capable of adapting to evolving technological developments. With this view, the Department of Land Resources has taken special note of the growing integration of technology in the daily life of the citizens, and the increasing dependence on registered documents for the purposes of carrying due diligences and legal verification.
The Department of Land Resources has further observed that is essential to clearly outline the roles and responsibilities of registering officers, in a manner that enables such officials to uphold the integrity and reliability of the registration process, consistent will all the applicable laws. Building upon these observations, there is now a need to provide a harmonized and enabling legislative framework to support secure, efficient, and citizen-centric registration practices across the country. The Bill was drafted with the aim of incorporating these progressive elements into the pre-existing framework.
Salient features of the Bill
The most prominent feature of the Bill is the online registration of the documents. Buyers and sellers of property will be able to digitally submit and register the documents involved in property related transactions. All such documents and any other related paperwork can be submitted online, via a dedicated portal. The verification and approval of such documents will also be completed online, reducing the need for any manual approval of the documents. This shift to an online mode of the registration will make the process accessible to parties that do not reside near the property in question, eliminating the need for such parties to find local middlemen who are willing to carry out the process on their behalf. By introducing strict timelines for these registration compliances, the Bill aims to shorten the timeline associated with the traditional registration process. The entire online registration process will span over a few hours, as opposed to the cumbersome timelines of the Registration Act, wherein the process usually spanned over a few days or weeks.
In order to effectively maintain land records, the Bill expands the scope of the Registration Act by making the registration of additional conveyancing documents mandatory. The Bill aims to link the legal validity of these documents with the completion of the registration process, thus reducing the scope of any grey areas that are typically associated with the validity of poorly stored physical documents and files. The additional documents that require mandatory registration include: (i) agreements to sell, (ii) sale certificates, (iii) any power of attorney executed in relation to property, and (iv) instruments of equitable mortgage. Upon the successful registration of these documents, the registering party will receive an e-certification recording the registration of the document. All documents will be archived digitally, making them easier to retrieve, share, and verify in future transactions. This modification will bring about a higher standard of maintenance of record of property documentation, while ensuring that all associated documents are perceived to meet the same standards of legal validity as the core documents. Further, the Bill proposes that Aadhaar is used as the mode of identity authentication for the verification of parties involved in the transaction. The process will use OTP or biometric authentication, making the registration more secure and traceable. This adds a second layer of scrutiny to the registration of documents, further enhancing the reliability of the records stored and the legal validity of the same.
The Bill also proposes changes to the governance norms associated with the erstwhile registration process, by proposing a hierarchy of institutional officers. This hierarchy introduces the posts of Additional and Assistant Inspectors General of Registration, who will be tasked with exerting a superintendence over the functioning of all registration offices in their respective jurisdictions.
Conclusion
The introduction of an online registration process is not unheard of. Close to eighteen states and union territories in India had already provided for online portal that permitted citizens to register property documents without physically submitting any documents for verification. What sets this Bill apart is the procedural uniformity that it brings out to the pre-existing state-specific measures. The explicit classification of documents that are required to be registered in order to be considered valid will only strengthen the entire system of property documentation, as all papers related to conveyancing of the property will be smoothly recorded on a unified database. The Bill is a clear indication of the government's intent to integrate the benefits offered by the development of technology into the governance of the land registration process.
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