Motihari district registry office. Picture by Ajit Kumar Verma

The district sub-registration office, already suffering for want of adequate number of staff for the past several years, seems to have more troubles because of slow pace of digitisation process of records.

Similar is the condition of seven other sub-registration offices in the district because of growing pressure of work.

Of the sanctioned posts of 87 lower and upper division clerks, offices of the district sub-registrar as well as seven offices of the assistant sub-registrars in East Champaran are functioning with the help of only 37 office personnel, said district sub-registrar Sanjay Kumar.

It has resulted into inordinate delay in implementation of the model deed paper, which is yet to be made mandatory during registration in the district.

It was already introduced by the government and uploaded on the Net for registration purposes with an aim to curb the involvement of deed-writer and middleman culture in the registration offices. Most of the office assistants have remained untrained for this also, Kumar added.

It has been designed, developed and implemented by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), Bihar State Centre. All 111 registry offices of the state have been System for Computerised Registration (SCORE) enabled in a record time of three months on an innovative and indigenously evolved cost effective model of Hardware on Hire Basis yielding a sharp increase in the state’s revenue.

He, however, expressed satisfaction that against the annual target of revenue collection (from March 2013 to April 2014), 70.33 per cent had already been achieved.

“Despite sanctioned posts, none of these offices has any head clerks or office superintendents. Preservation of several old and important records might hit the roadblock for want of record-keepers there. Many important records have been preserved in the district sub-registrars office since 1840,” said an employee, on condition of anonymity.