New Delhi, Dec. 4 -- The Centre will soon issue instructions to states for a major overhaul of India's urban property registration system by 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. He 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). Linking registrations directly to GIS, will bring transparency, reduce disputes and standardise how property boundaries are recorded, he said. A deeper structural concern, he said, is the absence of proper ownership documents for a significant share of urban residents. "Even in stronger administrative states such as Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, roughly half the surveyed property owners lacked fully admissible documents-registered sale deeds, inheritance papers or entries in the Record of Rights. In unauthorized colonies, including in major cities, registrations remain impossible because layouts lack formal approval, leaving residents with weak or unusable paperwork," he said. The NAKSHA programme was first mooted in the Budget 2024-25 on July 23, 2024, with finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announcing GIS mapping for urban land records digitization and an IT-based system for property administration and tax management. Currently the phase 2 of a pilot programme involves 157 small urban centres of area less than 35 sqkm and population less than 200,000. Sanjay Kumar, CEO at Geospatial World and founder of World Geospatial Industrial Council, said, "Disagreements arose because maps were inaccurate, sketches were rough, and coordinates were unreliable."...