The High Court of Karnataka has directed the Chief Commissioner of the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) to digitise documents of all types of properties, including old records, and give access to all the digitised documents to the officers who are empowered in law to adjudicate the complaints related to the properties.
The BBMP has to formulate a mechanism for making available the sanctioned plans, katha certificates, tax paid receipts, self-assessment forms etc. of all properties in the digital format to all officers, who are authorised to take penal action under the BBMP Act, the court said, while clarifying that such access should be only through user credentials based on user name and password, so that the records are not available to any third parties.
Justice Suraj Govindaraj issued the directions on a petition filed by Aslama Pasha, questioning an order passed against him in relation to the construction of a building on the grounds that the petitioner had failed to produce the sanctioned plan.
The petitioner had claimed that there existed a sanctioned plan but there was a delay in its production before the BBMP authorities.
Single entity
The court said that though different departments of the BBMP deal with different aspects, the civic body is one single entity comprising all those departments, and hence access to all the documents should be available to all authorised officers.
When the BBMP itself possesses the documents in its custody, it cannot call upon the citizen to furnish such documents, and cannot draw any adverse inference for non-production as was done in the present case, the court said, while observing that if the documents were not produced nothing prevented the BBMP officials from examining its own records.
The court made it clear that one department of the BBMP cannot claim that it does not possess certain documents related to a property as they were issued by another department.
Map and tag documents
As there could be documents relating to a particular property available with different departments of the State government, the BBMP and the e-Governance Department of the government will have to map and tag all such documents with the BBMP’s property data, the court added.
