KARACHI: About four months ago, I bought an apartment in Defence, Karachi. I applied for a sale deed registration at the relevant registrar’s office. When I went to collect the said deed after four months, I was told that it was not ready yet and that I should check again after a few weeks. Accordingly, I went there to collect the document but was again told it was not ready and that I should contact them after two months. Boggled by this reply, I consulted a lawyer and he told me that it does not take this long to register a document with the registrar. Equipped with this knowledge, I again went to the registrar’s office but no one there was inclined to give me any response about the fate of my document. Finally, a clerk opened up his day book, turned some pages and pointed to the blank entries there, which he explained were due to the reason that I had not applied for urgent registration and that my case had not even been forwarded yet for processing. More than four months had passed since I applied for the sale deed registration and yet I was told that the registrar’s office had not done anything about it.
I had a heated argument with the staff there, with the employees treating me as if I was a fool. While this altercation was going on, a person on the premises approached me, introduced himself as an advocate and said that he could get my documents for me and save me from more trouble. The long and short of the story is that the advocate took my receipt number, came out of the office of the registrar as if he owned the place and told me that he would deliver me the registered sale deed provided I bribed him or if I brought the seller into the office. How on earth could I bring in the seller who had already been paid in front of the registrar and had left after signing the documents at the time of the submission? I was finally reduced to thrashing out a deal with the advocate — who I discovered was a tout of the registrar’s office. He then went to his house and brought me the original sale deed and other official documents and thus the saga ended.
The moral behind this story is that the property registrar offices have turned into dens of extreme corruption and there is no check on their nefarious activities. How outrageous it is that they should pass over official records to their touts to blackmail applicants who come to register their documents? Evidently, this is not possible without the collusion of the registration office staff who employ such touts to firstly, illegally identify people who are complete strangers to them; secondly, these touts act as frontmen for the registration authorities to extort money from applicants by deceiving them that their documents would be registered if they bribed them and all this goes on while the documents have already been registered through the normal process and are lying with the registration authorities but who do not want to deliver them to the applicants without fleecing them.
The ministry concerned and the revenue board must look into the corruption brewing at the property registration offices. NAB must look into the issue as well and investigate how the employees at the registrar’s office live beyond their means and without any scruples of conscience or remorse.
Mazhar Butt
Published in The Express Tribune, January 9th, 2013.
