What is a mother deed, and how do you obtain another copy of a lost mother deed for my land?

August 14, 2021

Mother deed traces history of ownership.

Ownership of property changes hands through a series of transactions. It is very important to trace the ownership of a property, especially when it is either being purchased, offered as a security, or court case.

Mother deed determines ownership of a property. Tracing ownerships should always begin with scrutiny of the earliest document recorded. If such documents are not made available, certified copies have to be obtained from the registering authorities. This process should not be ignored. Earlier documents are called mother or parent documents.

Property transaction changes hands by various modes like sale, gift, partition, and inheritance. Each change of ownership has to be traced with the help of a transfer document. The sequence should be in chronological order, continuous and unbroken. Any missing link has to be carefully scrutinized by referring to the records at registering offices. The transfer flow should be traced.

Please be noted that partition deed, gift deed, release deed, settlement deed, and power of attorney are not mother documents

The mother deed consists of the following information

Seller & buyer details
Property schedule
Consideration value (Price)
Terms of payment (transaction number, date and bank details)
Government charges (stamp duty & registration)
Terms & conditions of sale
Witness

It is important that mother deed should be registered at the jurisdictional sub-registrar office.

Let me give you a real example that how I obtained the certified copy of mother deed.

We want to sell a property, buyer demanded mother deed to cross verify the ownership. we didn’t have original mother deed, as it was lost long back but we had photocopy.

Buyer’s bank demanded either original or certified copy to authenticate the mother deed. hence we decided to apply for certified copy.

Below is the photocopy of mother deed.

This property was registered in Shivaji Nagar sub-registrar office, Bangalore in the year of 1995. We approached the same sub-registrar office with following documents

Application form for certified copy
Photocopy of mother deed

We filed the application and paid the application fee of Rs. 1200. ( The complete process is offline so we should have strong follow-up and may require to pay additional fee to expedite the process. The above fee is not fixed, it depends on year of registration, sub-registrar, and officials response)

Received a call from sub-registrar in 4 working days from the day of application filing and asked to collect the certified copy

The certified copy looks like the below image.