Some files get buried in government offices. Some get misplaced. But three registered sale deeds relating to properties in Bardez managed to do something considerably more unusual – they disappeared, triggered an FIR and then mysteriously turned up in the same office nearly a year later.
The three deeds had been registered at the Bardez Sub-Registrar’s office in Mapusa in May and June 2024. They were important documents for the respective property purchasers, who expected to receive their original registered deeds after completion of the registration process.
Instead, the documents could not be traced.
What began as an internal search soon became a matter serious enough to reach the police. With repeated efforts to locate the deeds failing, the Sub-Registrar lodged a complaint with Mapusa Police, following which an FIR was registered against unidentified persons in connection with the alleged theft of the documents.
The case immediately raised eyebrows.
These were not routine pieces of paper that could simply be written off as misplaced correspondence. A registered sale deed is a crucial document recording a property transaction. Its disappearance from the office entrusted with registering and preserving such records naturally raised questions over the system of custody, movement and handling of original documents.
For the purchasers, the wait was particularly unsettling.
While police began looking into the disappearance, the three deeds remained untraced.
And then came the twist.
After a good 11 months of the documents remaining untraced and while the police inquiry was under way, the three sale deeds were reportedly found within the Sub-Registrar’s office itself.
The discovery brought relief, particularly to the purchasers, but it also created an equally uncomfortable question: If the deeds had not left the government premises, where had they been all this time?
A source in the Civil Registrar’s office said the police case was closed after the documents were recovered.
However, the matter did not necessarily end there. A departmental inquiry is expected to establish how the documents went missing, who was handling them and whether responsibility can be fixed on the dealing clerk or other personnel.
The episode is now a curious footnote in Mapusa’s bureaucratic history – three important property documents disappear, a theft case is registered, police search for answers and the missing deeds eventually surface in the very office from where they had vanished.
For a department entrusted with registration and preservation of property records, the episode raises a larger administrative question: If original sale deeds can become untraceable inside the office, what safeguards exist to ensure the integrity and custody of documents that determine ownership of land?
That question arguably deserves answers even after the files themselves have been found.
