The most hackneyed word used in a property advertisement is ‘Your Dream House’. But, too often, the dream turns into a nightmare. There have been thousands of cases of the buyer of a property realising a bit too late and after substantial sum of money changed hands, that he/she has been cheated into buying the property from a fraudster faking ownership.
Unfortunately, our civil law does not help the victim; it in fact, aids and supports, even encourages, the fraudster. And that’s how cases get piled up in the civil courts and a dispute could drag on through generations. This column attempts at examining this ridiculously flawed system.
We will begin with that momentous dawn of Independence when the new Republic created systems meant to help the citizen. One part of this system and a very important one at that is the Revenue Department, which deals with property/land issues — such as who owns a property, what is there now and how much of taxes should be collected.
The department issues patta for the property, which ensures that the possessor of the property is in its actual possession. It also issues chitta/adangal in the case of farmland to identify whether it is wet land or dry land, the revenue to be collected, and so on.
At one point of time, this land revenue was the main income for the government and so this department was given a lot of importance. It even included the survey department with the maps of various areas marked out right from the days of the kings and British rule.
But revenue from land has now diminished much whereas taxes and duties from other areas such as liquor, industry, income tax, sales tax and customs have gone up hugely. Among the big income getters for the government now is the registration department, which registers transfer of property from the seller to the buyer.
During the era of the kings and even under the British rule, registration was not all that compulsory. In the early days, all land belonged to the king and the ruler sanctioned / gifted a piece of land to the chosen few. They gifted Inams (Inamdars) and zamins (Zamindars) who collected taxes and after remitting a large portion to the ruler, enjoyed the rest of the money and several privileges.
But when Independence came, the Indian Constitution’s first Act was the Abolition of Zamindari Act. Rajaji and Muthuramalinga Thevar stoutly opposed it and quit the Congress party in anger — saying they fought for freedom from the British and Free India was taking away their lands through this Act.
The Mirasdars of Thanjavur were mostly Brahmins appointed by the kings and Rajaji did not like them losing their lands. The land-owning class, post-independence, became anti-Congress, anti-Nehru, says my good friend K. Elangovan, a JNU educated lawyer practising at the Madras high court.
Next came the Land Reforms in 1961, which prescribed that an individual could own only 15 standard acres and the rest of his holding should be distributed among the landless people. But as the records go, this Land Reforms Act of 1961 has been properly implemented only in West Bengal and Kerala.
Now back to the Revenue Department: with the mobility of land ownership becoming more, the government created the Registration Department to register such transactions. But then, there was no interaction between the two departments to ensure that fraudulent sale deeds did not get registered and multiple ‘ownership’ documents not created.
