CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu’s registration department has floated a tender for a major digitisation exercise to bring property records dating back to 1865 and millions of birth and death records into searchable digital databases.
Inspector General of Registration G K Arun Sundar Thayalan told TNIE that the government has sanctioned the digitisation of 2.23 crore documents, involving an estimated 11.15 crore pages at an average of five pages per document, making the process one of the state’s largest digitisation exercises to date. The exercise will address the gaps left by an earlier drive to scan historical property documents registered between 1865 and July 2009.
The exercise, expected to make older property records easier to search and retrieve, will make it easier to verify ownership histories and detect forged or duplicate transactions, thereby curbing fraud. It will cover an estimated 23 lakh pages, besides logging the data from around 5.69 crore birth and death records.
The department will also digitally log encumbrance-related details from documents registered between 1865 and 1974. About 7.06 crore documents spread across 581 sub-registrar offices in nine zones — Chennai, Cuddalore, Coimbatore, Madurai, Salem, Tirunelveli, Thanjavur, Tiruchy, and Vellore — are expected to be covered. Once processed and verified, the property records would be migrated to STAR 2.0, the registration department’s digital platform.
The entire exercise is expected to be completed in 14 months, with digitisation targeted for completion by the thirteenth month and the final month reserved for verification and handover, officials said. The department would require 1.2 petabytes of storage system for the entire exercise.
On the data-security and access-control arrangements, Thayalan said the digitisation process will include controls designed to establish an audit trail for every batch. Department officials will authenticate batches using fingerprints before applying a digital signature.
The material will be stored at the state data centre in Perungudi in a secured zone maintained jointly by the National Informatics Centre and Elcot.
Bids for the project are scheduled to open on September 15 and close on September 23.
