Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation has approved a Rs 1 crore proposal to scan and digitise old property records from its estate and tax departments, allowing citizens to obtain many documents online instead of repeatedly visiting municipal offices.
The proposal was approved on 24 October by the civic body’s E-Governance, Electrical and Material Procurement Committee. Gujarat Infotech Ltd has been assigned the scanning work under the approved proposal, according to a report by Gujarat Samachar – Ahmedabad.
The digitisation initiative will initially cover important records maintained by the estate and tax departments. These include building permissions, building-use permissions, building plans and layouts, property cards, possession notices, notices relating to unauthorised construction, property transfer details, tax clearance certificates, final plot numbers and details, town planning scheme maps and zoning certificates.
The tax department records listed for digitisation include property tax bills, tax payment receipts, no-dues certificates, tenement numbers, 7/12 and 8-A records, copies of sale documents, society-related documents and legal documents. The municipal corporation is expected to make the records available online after scanning, with citizens paying the prescribed fee to obtain them digitally.
The proposal addresses a long-standing access problem involving older properties. Ahmedabad has an estimated 22 lakh to 24 lakh properties, including both new and old holdings. While documents relating to newer properties are generally easier to locate, records for older properties may require visits to different municipal offices and manual searches through files. Even after those visits, applicants may not know whether the required document can be found.
The plan is particularly significant for records dating back 80 to 90 years. Ahmedabad had developed as a major city even before Indian Independence, and municipal offices may hold documents from that period. Scanning these files is intended both to improve public access and to support their preservation over the longer term.
The committee chairman said citizens would continue to pay a prescribed fee for obtaining documents online, in a process similar to the existing offline system. The digitisation programme will begin with estate and tax records, while other departments’ older documents may be added later.
The move could make property verification, tax compliance, ownership-related applications and access to planning records less dependent on physical files and repeated visits to civic offices. However, the report does not specify when the online service will go live, how many records will be digitised in the first phase or what portal will host the documents. Those details will determine how quickly the approved spending translates into a usable public service.
