Records of properties in Bengaluru Urban to be digitised

BENGALURU: The District Administration (DA) of Bengaluru Urban district is all set to conduct a feasibility study for digitising property records. The DA wants to conduct the test before converting all the records into an electronic form, after it failed in its previous attempts in the matter.

The major reason behind the exercise is that the DA has lost many cases of land disputes in courts recently due to records being misplaced in departments and old paper documents getting rotten or becoming brittle, leading to loss of data to present as evidence in the courts.

An earlier attempt at digitising records by the DA failed midway after most of the documents required for the work were not submitted by officials. An official who did not wish to be identified said, “The work failed previously as officials and low-level officers did not hand over papers to the consultants for this work and delayed the entire procedure involved. It was apparent that the low-level officials did not want the papers to be digitised and finally the consultants who had taken up the work abandoned it.”  

Speaking to The New Indian Express, BM Vijay Shankar, Deputy Commissioner, Bengaluru Urban, said, “The work has to be taken up as we have lost most of our cases in court due to records going missing. Also, many of the record papers are very old... so old that they have already become brittle and we need to ensure that the land records are safe. So we will conduct the feasibility work for converting all records from paper to digital. Previously, the work was stopped midway due to unknown reasons.”