Over 800 document writers abstain from work on Monday
Over 800 document writers in the district abstained from work on Monday and protested against the online system of registration made mandatory recently by the State Government.
Document registration almost came to a standstill across the district. Just one per cent of the documents that did not come through the writers were registered, claim sources, though this could not be confirmed officially.
At the sub-registrar office at the Collectorate alone registration of nearly 100 documents were affected on Monday because of the protest, claimed M. Maheshkumar, district secretary of Tamilnadu Document-Copy Writer Association.
He said the document writers want both, the online and offline options. With the mandatory online system, it takes about three days to prepare a document because the system is slow and the sub-registrar needs to approve it in another three days. This takes a lot of time for one document. So the number of documents registered a day has fallen sharply in the last one week. “By introducing the online system, the Government has sold the department to a private company,” he alleged. .
There are problems with the payment mode too. During the trial period, the receipt would be generated only if the payment is processed. Now, the receipt is available even if the payment status shows failure.
Karthik, a document writer at Ganapathy sub-registrar office, said he had made an online payment for Rs. 1,96,315 on February 15. The amount was debited and an acknowledgement was generated.
However, the system showed the status of payment as failure. The response at the call centre was not proper.
The property buyer and seller had to wait for two days for the issue to be settled. In the earlier system, payment would take less than half an hour.
The document writers said the strike will continue till the issues related to online registration are resolved.