Aadhaar to Be Made Mandatory for Property Sale

The Indian government is continuing its efforts to curb disproportionate accumulation of property and put an end to benami property transactions. As per a government mandate released in February 2017, Aadhaar is now mandatory for land registration. While its implementation is still tenuous in some states, Andhra Pradesh has made it compulsory for buyers and sellers of property to have the Aadhaar card to register the sale deed from March 2017 onwards.

Progress of Aadhaar-linked land registration across states

Land registration in Jharkhand has dropped drastically since February after the Aadhaar card was made mandatory, which is largely due to lack of proper authentication machinery and not due to lack of the UID of buyers and sellers. In most states, the staff is ill-equipped to handle the authentication procedures as the data has not been updated properly leading to a virtual standstill of all land registration processes.

Officials in the registry office have stated that the devices given to them for authenticating the identity of buyers as per details given in their Aadhaar cards are failing to authenticate their owners. The policy of making the card mandatory for registration of the sale deed is affecting NRIs hard as not many have had their UID cards made and are now unable to sell or buy any property. According to officials handling the identification procedures, the inability of the device to identify more than a few people every day could largely be a software glitch that can get corrected after a few months of use.

Significance of this policy

According to Ajay Bhushan Pandey, the CEO of UIDAI, the move will reduce litigations and property disputes while also curbing fraud in the real estate industry. Though the move has led to several protests in social media about the lack of proper equipment and verification issues, Aadhaar being an integral component of Digital India is most likely to stay for land registration too.

The Minister for Law and Justice and Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad, stated that the move to link Aadhaar to all government welfare measures like gas subsidies, rations through PDS, MNREGA payments, etc., has helped to curb leakages of around Rs. 50,000 crores that were being syphoned off by middlemen.