Property ownership records project to start from Jayanagar in October

The Pattabhiram Nagar ward in Jayanagar will mark Bengaluru’s first tryst with Urban Property Ownership Records (UPOR), under which unique legal property ownership titles will be issued.

An estimated 10,000 properties in the ward, including several localities in Jayanagar, will be covered in the survey, also called City Survey, that is expected to commence next month. The Survey Settlement and Land Records (SSLR) department is anchoring the project.

The UPOR project is taking off in Bengaluru almost five years after the previous BJP regime cleared its implementation in 50 BBMP wards.

“Legally speaking, this will be the first documentation of ownership,” SSLR commissioner Munish Moudgil said.

Under UPOR, property owners will be issued property register (PR) cards, capturing spatial details of a property, area of the land, rights on the property (ownership, mortgage, lease etc) and history of transactions.

“We are collecting documents of ownership from the BBMP and our teams are setting up control points for mapping of properties. We should hit the road by October 20 and the process will take about 2-3 months,” Moudgil said.

Under the existing system, there is no document that establishes the ownership of a property. Sale deed and khata are only deemed-to-be property ownership documents. “An estimated 20% of people in every city are sitting on just sale agreements. If someone is living in a house for 20 years without sale deed, such a person cannot be legally declared as the owner,” Moudgil explained.

The SSLR department chose Pattabhiram Nagar to start the UPOR as it is believed that property ownership here is largely unlitigated. “Most parts of old Bengaluru such as Jayanagar and Basavanagudi have clean properties. The only problem is with ghetto-like colonies,” said Jayanagar MLA B N Vijay Kumar, under whose constituency the Pattabhiram Nagar ward falls.

According to Moudgil, the UPOR project in Bengaluru faced an inordinate delay due to procedural problems. “The UPOR for Bengaluru needed a software. The tender bids were too expensive, so we ended up designing one internally. Also, tenders
were floated inviting agen-cies to do the survey. We
roped in an agency to just provide us manpower,” he said. A mobile app has been designed to help make surveying work easy.

The UPOR is already underway at Mysuru, Shivamogga and Mangaluru where 5.68 lakh properties have been surveyed.