Goans wishing to sell off their ancestral land in Goa are put to a lot of inconvenience and hassles to prove ownership of their property through title deeds. Form 1 and XIV are of little use as they are not legal documents that can be produced as title documents, although the form mentions the name of the owner, area of the property, survey and sub division numbers. The title deed can only be obtained in the Goa Archives department, where all land records and ownership are in Portugese script, and one has to scan several ledgers with the help of a translator to obtain details of ownership. Secondly, the name of the property ( land) mentioned in the Archives records does not tally with the name of the property mentioned in Form 1 and XIV as these names existed much before the Surveys were undertaken by the Goa govt, resulting in a mismatch. To make matters worse are Matriz numbers in old Portugese records which do not match with present survey numbers. This is the plight of property owners in Goa, and it is a pity that there is no proper system of maintaining old records, unlike that under the British Raj, which is continued even today, where a property card is in possession of every owner of property, showing all details of previous sales and owners---- a bonafide document that cannot be challenged.
