the 1882 Transfer of Property Act which stipulates that sale of any tangible immovable property worth Rs. 100 or more can only be made by registered instrument. As registrars will register any instrument presented to them without thoroughly checking its validity or the existence of countervailing claims, registration provide no conclusive evidence of ownership (Wadhwa 2002). Still, entries in the registry have value as they are admissible as evidence in court. Moreover, the registry department makes available summaries of all transactions that have been registered by a specific person or for a parcel through socalled encumbrance certificates (ECs). While ECs can not preclude that undisclosed or registered claims may surface, they provide evidence of the transaction history that can enable legal experts to provide an assessment of the likelihood that challenges against a specific claim may appear. The fact that any registered transaction incurs large amounts of stamp duty<sup>3</sup> has transformed property registration into a major source of government income (Alm _et al._ 2004). Given that it contributes as much as one third of revenue in many states, property registration has thus emerged as a system parallel to land records, especially in urban areas where land records had not existed to start with.

At the same time, property registration in many Indian states suffers from a number of problems. High fees and the fact that recording, storage, and retrieval of transactions were conducted on an entirely manual basis rendered the process cumbersome for customers and provided ample scope for petty and large-scale corruption. The need to pay ‘speed money’ to have certain transactions processed in a timely manner has been legendary and widespread.<sup>4</sup> More importantly, officials had significant discretion in determining property values, thereby reducing the amount of stamp duty to be paid on any given transaction and pocketing part of the difference. All of this reduced owners’ incentives to register transactions and drove land transfers into informality. Measures to improve the functioning of the registry system should thus have a direct impact on observed outcomes.

In response to backlogs that delayed processing of simple registrations by more than 10 years and reports about undervaluation of property causing rampant corruption and revenue loss, the state of Maharashtra developed software that was deployed to all of the state’s land registry offices in 1997 through a publicprivate partnership. Results for customers and government were very positive: standard registration processes now take 30 minutes rather than years to complete and automated property valuation eliminated officials’ discretion. The number of registered transfers increased by more than 50%, from about 1 million (mn.) in 1998/99 to more than 1.5 mn. in 2004/05. Stamp duty collections more than doubled, from Rs. 16 billion. to Rs. 41 billion, despite a significant reduction in rates (from 13% to 8%) over the

> 3 The stamp duty to be paid for registering deeds ranges between 5% and 12.5% of the property’s market value for sales and 0.5 to 2% for mortgages, often with surcharges for properties located in cities. Registration fee is normally between 0.5% and 2% of the property value. 4 A large survey of users of land administration services in all states estimates  the amount of bribes paid annually in this sector at US $700 million, three-quarters of the public spending on science, technology, and environment (Transparency International India 2005).

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