India, Dec. 3 -- The Centre will soon issue a set of instructions to states for a major overhaul of India's urban property registration system, replacing rough, hand-drawn sketches attached to deeds with precise latitude-longitude coordinates, ensuring every transaction can be linked to a mapped parcel.

"Ultimately, every transaction must be visible on GIS (Geographic Information System)," Manoj Joshi, secretary at the department of land records, said on Wednesday.

Joshi said the current property registration setup functions like a "black box" where digital paperwork still lands in files without connecting to any spatial database at the National Symposium on NAKSHA (National Geospatial Knowledge-based Land Survey of Urban Habitations). ...