Supreme Court calls for blockchain reform in land registration system

The Supreme Court has called for a fundamental overhaul of the land registration system, suggesting that modern technologies—such as blockchain—should be deployed to bring greater transparency and legal certainty to property transactions. The top court called buying and selling property in India a “traumatic” experience. Data suggests that more than two-thirds of civil disputes in India’s courts are linked to property disputes.

The court also suggested that blockchain—described as a digital ledger technology that records information in linked, time-stamped blocks and makes entries permanent and tamper-proof—could help prevent fraudulent sales and multiple registrations of the same property by permanently recording titles, transfers and ownership history.

A bench of the Supreme Court of India (SC), led by Justices P. S. Narasimha and Joymalya Bagchi, on Nov. 7 struck down a Bihar government regulation that made mutation (a government-recorded change of land holding) a mandatory condition for registering a sale deed. The regulation had been introduced via sub-rules 19(xvii) and (xviii) of the Bihar Registration Rules in 2019.

Supreme Court rules

The court held that while registration of documents under the Registration Act, 1908, records a transaction, it does not itself confer ownership. It found the Bihar requirement arbitrary and beyond the powers of the Inspecting General of Registration under Section 69 of the Act. Since the mutation process in Bihar remains incomplete and outdated, making it a prerequisite for registration would unfairly burden landowners, the court said.

In its broader remarks, the court observed that India still operates under laws and processes inherited from the colonial era, and highlighted that the “dichotomy between registration and ownership” is a substantial contributor to the country’s land-related litigation load—property disputes account for an estimated 66 per cent of all civil cases. 

The bench suggested that blockchain—described as a digital ledger technology that records information in linked, time-stamped blocks and makes entries permanent and tamper-proof—could help prevent fraudulent sales and multiple registrations of the same property by permanently recording titles, transfers and ownership history.

To move forward, the court recommended that the Law Commission of India coordinate with the central government and states to examine the issue and propose necessary legislative reforms (including to the Transfer of Property Act 1882, Registration Act 1908, Stamp Act 1899, Evidence Act 1872, Information Technology Act 2000, and the Data Protection Act 2023) to enable integration of blockchain in the land registration regime.

In this case, the appeal titled Samiullah vs State of Bihar & Others (2025) resulted in the quashing of the 2019 Bihar notification. Each party was directed to bear its own costs.

What a blockchain is

A blockchain is a decentralised and immutable digital ledger that records transactions across many computers, making them transparent and resistant to tampering. Data is stored in blocks, which are linked together chronologically using cryptography to form a chain. This distributed nature of the cryptocurrency means that no single entity controls it, and any change requires a majority consensus from the network.