The Encumbrance Certificate in Punjab

Search on both handles. The property identity, village, khasra numbers, the holding as the jamabandi describes it, keeps the net over the right land while deed descriptions wander across the decades; the party names, the seller and each predecessor, catch instruments whose descriptions wandered too far. Recent years answer through the digital records; the older chain sits in the sub-registrar's bound volumes, and a purchase searches as far back as the title's story genuinely runs, not as far as the screen happens to reach.

Then make each instrument pay rent. A sale deed must show its Intkaal in the jamabandi; a mortgage stands live until its registered discharge is found by number; family settlements and gift deeds imply consents and resulting fractions worth confirming; and any court attachment outranks every verbal assurance in the room. Punjab adds its signature exhibit: deeds executed on powers of attorney. Each one gets its POA pulled, its grant verified with the principal where feasible, its revocation status checked, because the state's best-known land frauds are POA stories, told at the expense of owners eleven time zones away.

The reconciliation is the finish. Deed chain on one side, the Fard's mutation trail on the other: every registered transfer should have produced its entry, every entry should trace to a lawful instrument, and each orphan on either side is exactly the finding the exercise exists to produce. Orphans get explained at the tehsil and the sub-registrar's office before completion, on paper, or the deal waits.

Both handles, honest depth, POAs verified, then the bridge.

The method

Every entry assigns homework.

Punjab encumbrance work leaks in four places.

Because so much Punjab land is held from abroad, the power of attorney is the hinge of the market and of its frauds.