Varudu Nagaraju pores over a bunch of stapled, stamped papers belonging to the men sitting on the other side of the table in his two-roomed office. They want to buy property and need Nagaraju’s help with the registration process.

Nagaraju’s office is in Vijayawada, in Andhra Pradesh. There are an estimated 150,000-200,000 self-proclaimed document writers in the south-eastern state.

The Indian Registration Act stipulates that anyone buying property must register the transaction and documents at the Registration and Stamps Department. In the districts, this is done at the sub-registrar offices (SROs), which also register marriages, societies and trusts.

“After getting the documents ready for the application for registration, I will send those over to the SRO upstairs, to the desk of a certain officer, who will verify and sign them, asserting that the new property, with the enclosed specifications, is now rightfully owned by my clients,” Nagaraju says.

He reluctantly admits that he usually feeds in small amounts of money to the right people along the way. This, he says, is to make sure awkward questions are not asked if, for example, the specifications in the submitted documents do not match the actual measurements.

Bribes are a common currency in registration offices. People often pay bribes to ensure that their purchase document shows a false, lower value to avoid higher stamp duty and other fees.

These practices cost the state in lost revenues, and the government of Andhra Pradesh is accelerating its efforts to digitise operations.

Under new plans, citizens will be able to submit applications for registration or for the issue of certificates at a front office where skilled staff will scan, organise and file the application digitally.

The idea is to make the process more transparent and efficient. The state government hopes to hire a third party to manage the new offices, although the details and financing have yet to be worked out.

A World Bank report released this year concluded that digital technology could be transformational but for dividends to be widely shared there also had to be improvements in the business climate, in education and health, and in governance.

The authorities in Andhra Pradesh hope the drive to digitise official procedures will itself yield governance gains and eradicate some of the irregularities experienced all too often by people like Srinivas Koppala, a lecturer in Vijayawada, who tried to register a property purchase two years ago.

“I pay my taxes all right and would have preferred to follow a transparent system … However, the seller wanted 50% in cash, which would go unrecorded. Since I am a salaried person and availed of a bank loan for the purchase, I could not pay the high volume of cash,” he says.

“Naturally, my available options for apartments reduced. I finally found a seller who agreed to take a reduced percentage in cash, and his team of writers prepared documents stating the amount covered by the bank loan as the property value.”

Many Indians are sceptical about what goes on inside registration offices or confused by the seemingly complex procedures. That’s where people like Nagaraju come in, offering to cut through the red tape for a fee but also creating an environment that encourages corruption.



Now, as India embraces the digital age, Nagaraju and his colleagues face the possibility that they may be clicked out of existence.

Last year, Narendra Modi, the prime minister, sought to reinvigoriate the $18bn (£12.5bn) Digital India campaign, which is supposed to connect 250,000 villages to the internet by 2019, and improve transparency in government offices.

During a trip last year to the US west coast and Silicon Valley, Modi, who has 18.6m followers on Twitter, declared that India had “moved on from scriptures to satellites”. But there is a long way to go to meet government promises to connect the country and install a national fibre optic network.

The move towards digital has been under way in Andhra Pradesh since 1999. One of the most tangible benefits came in 2014, when some of the simpler tasks performed by the registration offices, such as issuing copies of documents, were delegated to Mee Seva, a quasi-government online service provider in Andhra Pradesh.

Mee Seva, which means “at your service” in Telugu, allows citizens to access services and databases online, including land and registration records. The documents can be signed digitally by officials, ending what it calls the “tyranny of ink signatures”.

“We have come a long way,” says Gudisa Bala Krishna, district registrar for Vijayawada East. “But there’s still a long, long way to go. Now, you can get a certificate of ownership, birth or marriage issued and printed in minutes from any Mee Seva centre. Also, if you buy your property here in Vijayawada, you can register it from anywhere in Andhra Pradesh.”

Passengers use smartphones at Mumbai Central railway station. India’s 100 busiest stations will have high-speed Wi-Fi by the end of 2016. Photograph: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg/Getty

Going fully digital is a complex and time-consuming process, and it will take a lot of political will. Yet, even with these obstacles, the need for document writers is likely to dwindle quickly.

“Digitisation would ruin the means of livelihood of self-employed document writers all over the state, as well as ancillary professionals such as desktop publishing or data entry operators, photocopy shop owners, stamp vendors and surveyors,” says Nagaraju. “We work together in the interest of our clients, who will have no clue about how to get their documents registered securely, without our assistance.”

Bala Krishna says the document writers are no longer recognised by the government and must adapt: he recommends they rename themselves consultants and fix a reasonable fee for the services they offer.

“Digitisation of our records is not something that the government woke up to one fine morning in 2016. It has been an ongoing process since 1999. Technology is evolving and it is making administrative tasks easier and inclusive. Most importantly, it has the ability to make processes transparent.”