Poor response to conveyance deed drive

It's been over four months since the state government launched a special drive to issue deemed conveyance to housing societies, but the response has been poor, plagued as the drive is with problems ranging from calculation of stamp duty to lack of awareness among flat owners about the importance of forming a society.A deemed conveyance is important as it establishes the ownership of flat owners on the land on which the society has come up. Besides, it is a mandatory document that builders need to give once the cooperative housing society is formed.After it launched its drive on December 15, 2012, to issue deemed conveyance to societies where the builders had not completed formalities of society formation, the district deputy registrar office received 300 applications from flat owners in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad. Of these, 30 housing societies have been issued the conveyance deed, so far.The state has an uphill task ahead given the large number of societies that aren't registered as cooperative societies yet. Before the drive started, just about 2,892 societies of a total of 13,521 housing societies in the city had obtained the conveyance deed. The remaining 10,629 residential societies in Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad have not taken deemed conveyance so far.The main roadblock in at least half the cases is the calculation of stamp duty amount, as these societies came up before 1985. The ready reckoner rate system was not in force then and flat owners had then registered their properties on a stamp paper of Rs 5 or Rs 10 denomination. The office of Inspector General of Registration and Controller of Stamps (IGR), however, now expects the pre-1985 societies to pay the stamp duty as per the current ready reckoner rate, in case the conyevance deed was not executed then.The ready reckoner rate system of fixing the base price for every area in the state came into effect in 1985. According to it, people have to pay the stamp duty either on the basis of the price quoted in the agreement or the value of the propertyfixed as per the ready reckoner rate, whichever is higher.Contributing to the poor response to the drive are unsold flats and the reluctance among officials to take action against builders for non-execution of conveyance deeds. Officials say that while the number of residential buildings in the city is on the rise, very few of them are applying for the formation of a cooperative housing society, which gives the flat buyer the ownership of the land on which the building is built.The office has also issued an order in another 225 cases stating that these societies should be registered as cooperative housing societies, after hearing the builder and flat owners. However, increased workload has delayed the process of preparing a fresh 7/12 ownership extract (the official document that has the name of the flat owner along with those of other residents as owners of the land on which their society came up), in the name of the cooperative housing society. The 7/12 extract has been issued to only 30 societies.Of the 2,892 cooperative societies that have been duly registered, most are of government employees or those formed by bank employees or teachers' associations. Some of the societies have bungalow owners who had purchased undeveloped piece of land and developed it later.