Next Ten Registries

Why now

Four things changed in the last eighteen months

Sep 2026

DILRMP 3.0 funds a Registration Repository

The Centre's ₹565.5 crore programme builds state Land Stacks joined by APIs, a digital store of deeds and encumbrances, and 75 Registration Seva Kendras at high-footfall Sub-Registrar offices. [2]

Jul 2026

Land records are ULI's bottleneck

The Department of Land Resources and RBI Innovation Hub began work on linking land records to the Unified Lending Interface, after bankers said weak land records were holding back its scale-up. [4] [5]

Apr 2026

Title search became lending infrastructure

Square Yards signed on to offer title search and e-valuation through ULI, built on more than 100 million registration records from five states. [6]

May 2025

The Registration Bill widens what must be registered

The draft bill to replace the 1908 Act makes agreements to sell, powers of attorney for property transfer and equitable-mortgage documents compulsorily registrable, and moves registration online. [7]

The register

Ten states, ranked for expansion

Each score adds three parts: registration market size (40 points), how much of the registration record is reachable online (40), and whether a large registration-data platform already covers the state (20). Select a state to see the evidence behind each cell.

Available online, per public source Partial limited span, pilot or unclear Not confirmed not found in sources reviewed market · access · white space

#				Deed search	Encumbrance	Certified copy	Auto-mutation

Revenue: PRS Legislative Research state budget analyses 2026–27 (2024–25 actuals; 2026–27 budget estimates). Feature status: official releases and published guides listed under Sources. "Not confirmed" means not found, not absent.

Two kinds of expansion

Where software is enough, and where you need people at the counter

Fast wins

Large market and most of the record online. Coverage here is mostly engineering: parse the portal, automate certified-copy requests, monitor turnaround. Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar sit here. Uttar Pradesh does too, but a large platform already covers it.

Ground-ops plays

Big money, thinner online record. Coverage depends on field staff, Sub-Registrar relationships and a data-sharing route with the Inspector General of Registration. Punjab is the clearest case: NGDRS is live in every district, but older decades are still in office registers.

Smaller markets

Chhattisgarh and Odisha pair strong online access with smaller markets, which makes them good pilot states for a launch playbook. Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh are smaller and less open.

The hidden cost

Turnaround is decided office by office

0510 working days

Published turnaround for a certified sale-deed copy on a title-search platform's own product pages, Oct 2026. [8] [9]

Measure the office, not just the state

The same document can take twice as long from one state to the next, and the published range within a state depends on the age of the document and the Sub-Registrar office. A state average hides the offices that set your delivery promise.

During my fellowship I pitched Sub-Registrar performance analytics to the Secretary of the Commercial Tax (Registration) Department, and it was taken up for implementation. The same lens works for a platform: track median and worst-case turnaround per office, then price and promise per office. See the prototype below.

Playbook

How I would open a new state in about sixty days

A sequence, built from how registration departments actually work. Weeks are indicative.

1

Weeks 1–2

Map the registry

Portal and software (NGDRS or the state's own), document types, fee schedule, digitised span, search and certified-copy rules under Section 57 of the Registration Act, and the RoR system it links to.

2

Weeks 2–3

Sample the offices

Ten Sub-Registrar offices across urban, peri-urban and rural districts: turnaround, record gaps, counter practice. This sets the delivery promise and the field-staff plan.

3

Weeks 3–5

Open the access route

Public portal first, certified-copy workflow second, then a formal data-sharing proposal to the Inspector General of Registration, written in the department's own format.

4

Weeks 4–6

Stand up field operations

Local hires at priority offices, Hindi and regional-language forms, name transliteration for party search, escalation contacts at district level.

5

Weeks 5–8

Close the loop with land records

Match registered deeds against the RoR to measure mutation lag. Unmutated sales are the title risk lenders pay to find.

6

Week 8 on

Launch and monitor

Weeks to launch, documents indexed, search success rate, and median turnaround per office, reviewed weekly against the promise.

What gets a Secretary to say yes

I pitched 30 registration reforms benchmarked across 10 states. The two taken up for implementation were Sub-Registrar performance analytics and dedicated counters for women and senior citizens.
Both cost the department little, both are visible to citizens, and both can be measured. A data-sharing proposal from a platform should pass the same three tests.
Lead with citizen benefit and alignment with DILRMP 3.0, show data security plainly, and ask for a pilot in a few offices before a statewide order.

About the author

Ayush Dewangan

Chief Minister's Good Governance Fellow with the Government of Chhattisgarh since August 2025, working in the Commercial Tax (Registration) and Housing & Environment departments. MBA in Public Policy & Governance at IIM Raipur, graduating April 2027.

Registration reform: Catalogued 30 reforms from 10 states and benchmarked Chhattisgarh against Karnataka, Telangana, Maharashtra and Gujarat. Two were taken up for implementation.
Detailed Project Report: Wrote the DPR for property-registration modernisation: architecture, legal framework, risk register and a ₹3.24 crore programme across 107 Sub-Registrar offices.
Citizen grievances: Mapped CM Helpline 1076 services for Commercial Tax and Housing & Environment, built the L1–L4 officer escalation map, and serve as the departmental point of contact on the portal.
Finance: B.Com (Hons). Site accountant for a construction firm: invoices, reconciliation, vendor ledgers. Three-statement and DCF models.
Building: Builds working prototypes with AI tools, including a Sub-Registrar performance scorecard for 107 offices on synthetic data.

Method

How the score works

Score = Market (40) + Online access (40) + White space (20)

Market: 2026–27 budget estimate for stamp duty and registration fees, on a log scale from ₹500 crore (0) to ₹50,000 crore (40).
Online access: deed search 12, encumbrance search or certificate 12, certified copy 8, registration-to-RoR auto-mutation 8. Available counts in full, partial counts half, not confirmed counts zero.
White space: 20 if the state is outside Square Yards' published registration-data coverage (Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi), otherwise 0.
Robustness: Rajasthan, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh stay in the top five when market is weighted at 60% and when access is weighted at 60%.

Limits. Feature status comes from official releases where available and from published guides otherwise; each cell is marked with its source type. Portals change, so check each one before relying on it. Budget estimates are targets, not collections. No departmental or non-public data was used.

Sources

पंजीयन · registration readinessThe next ten registries