Property Registration In Mumbai To Soon Go Cashless

Homebuyers in Mumbai could soon pay for property registration without physically visiting the department of registration and stamps. You could now make these payments using e-banking and e-wallet modes. For this, the department is likely to launch a new system, under a testing phase at present, by Diwali. With this system, the homebuyers will be able to register their property documents by paying the fees as well as the handling charges using cashless modes using various point of sales (POS) machines that the department will install across the city. At present, these machines are being integrated with the software for payment of document handling charges.

Earlier, homebuyers could use the Government Receipt Accounting System (GRAS) to make online payment for registering the documents but they had to visit the office physically to pay in cash the handling charges of Rs 20 per page. This amounted to a large sum of cash for the department to handle on a daily basis. According to media reports, the department’s 5,000 sub-registrar offices across the state handle over 7,000 documents of average 25 pages each, every day.

Meanwhile, the property registration fee and handling charges make up for a large portion of the department’s yearly revenues. During April-August 2018, the department could achieve around 50 per cent of its revenue generation target of Rs 24,000 crore by registering over 9.84 lakh documents. The department generated revenue of Rs 11,894 crore in these five months. During the same period in 2017, the department registered 9.08 lakh documents and earned a revenue of Rs 9,729 crore.