Government rolls back order on physical registration of leave and licence agreements

Over two months after it decided to stop physical registration of leave and licence agreements in some sub-registrar offices in Mumbai, the state has decided to roll back the order.

On October 7, the department of registration and stamps had decided that four sub-registrar offices — one each in the island city, Andheri, Borivli and Kurla — would be off limits for leave and licence registration. This was meant to reduce footfalls in these offices as these agreements form a bulk of the registration burden and give a boost to e-registration at empanelled service providers.

Senior officials said from Tuesday onwards, they had decided to withdraw the decision in three of the four offices, namely at Kurla, Andheri and Borivli, where manual registration will take place again.

"This is being done in view of the high registrations which happen in December. We had decided to stop physical registration of leave and licence documents at the Andheri-I, Kurla-I, Borivli-I and Mumbai city-I offices, but are withdrawing it for the time being in view of public convenience," an official said.

Mumbai has 25 registration offices including five in the city, six at Andheri, five at Kurla and nine at Borivli. Of these, leave and licence registrations have been stopped at one office in each location. This was a precursor to gradually ensure that all leave and licence documents were e-registered.

However, this was not being done "openly" due to the Supreme Court's judgment which said that the Aadhaar card will not be mandatory but can be used optionally to avail various welfare schemes.

Officials say that this Aadhaar-based e-registration, which will serve as an alternative to the cumbersome and time-consuming physical registration process, will help people file documents at their convenience, do away with the necessity of coming to government offices and being fleeced by agents and lawyers charging hefty fees. However, this may inconvenience people who do not hold Aadhaar cards or are unaware about the facility.

This reduction in footfalls would also enable the department to undertake back-end work on recovering stamp duty on around 50,000 documents in Mumbai (of a total 1.25 lakh in Maharashtra) pending for registration.

This e-registration will take place through authorised service providers (ASPs) — Mumbai has 71 now with plans to scale it up gradually to 200 by March — and also through the state government's MahaOnline portal. These service providers will charge Rs700 for these services (of which Rs150 will be paid to the department) and an extra Rs300 for home visits.

For e-registration, the parties to the document and their identifiers need to be Aadhaar card holders.

Officials say this will also prevent agents and lawyers from charging hefty amounts to people for drafting these agreements. The department had uploaded a draft document which would do away with such intermediaries.

"We have set ourselves a target to ensure that at least 50% of leave and licence documents are registered through the e-registration route by March. So, people who come to our offices for registering other documents will get good service while those registering leave and licence documents will be able to do so at their convenience," the official said.

Of the around 3 lakh leave and licence documents registered across Maharashtra, around 2.5 lakh are in Mumbai.

The department is also looking at allowing a non-Aadhar linked
e-KYC based authentication system to push e-registration of documents. This system, which will cover people who have registered their biometrics for various transactions at the sub-registrar offices since 2012, will ensure that more citizens can register their documents electronically.

Today, e-registration accounts for just around 10.09% of leave and licence documents registered. Apart from leave and licence documents, people can also register first sale of flats by developers and Mhada allotment letters from the Konkan Board using the facility. People with the necessary software and hardware can do so from the comfort of their home.