Chandigarh, June 27 -- The Rohtak divisional commissioner has ordered a detailed fact-finding inquiry into the handling of a manual land registration request by the family of a critically ill farmer observing that procedural delays and a legally flawed approach by the Sonepat district administration may have deprived him the opportunity to sell his land before his death. The land registration was crucial for the family as it was the final legal requirement for completing the sale of land and accessing funds that the family said were urgently needed for treatment. Sanjeet of Kanwali village in Sonepat had suffered a severe head injury, undergone two brain surgeries and was bedridden. The critically ill farmer died on June 10, five days after the Rohtak divisional commissioner, Rajiv Rattan, directed Sonepat deputy commissioner Neha Singh to facilitate manual registration of 2.20 acres through special provisions available under the Registration Act and complete the exercise within three days. Sanjeet's family alleged that despite the divisional commissioner's directions, the manual registration remained trapped in bureaucratic red tape, leaving them without access to funds from the land sale that were critical for his treatment. In a June 23 communication to the Sonepat deputy commissioner (DC), the Rohtak divisional commissioner wrote that the June 19 status report sent by DC's office in this regard was scrutinised and examined on points of law and fact. "This office is constrained to record that the grounds on which the application of Ravi (son of Sanjeet) was deferred fails to survive legal scrutiny, display a fundamental misconstruction of statutory duties and are hereby set aside based on grounds mentioned hereinafter,'' the divisional commissioner wrote. "Whether and to what extent, the administrative inertia and legally flawed deferrals by the registry officials directly contributed to preventing a citizen from executing his lawful affairs during his lifetime is a grave matter that cannot pass without administrative accountability. The specific conduct, noting and actions of the dealing officials shall be placed before this office. If any statutory dereliction, evasion of duty or avoidable bureaucratic delay is established, strict responsibility must be fixed in accordance with the relevant service rules,'' the commissioner said in a strongly worded note. The commissioner said that Sections 38 of the Registration Act was intrinsically a remedial and facilitative provision enacted by legislature to secure the rights of citizens who by reason of severe bodily infirmity are incapacitated from attending the public registry office. "The DC's office has conversely applied these enabling provisions restrictively, converting an enabling instrument into an adversarial barrier, thereby defeating the very legislative intent of the Act,'' the divisional commissioner wrote. The commissioner said the record demonstrated that the executant, Sanjeet, had undergone major neurosurgery and was discharged from clinical care on May 28, 2026. This material fact, on its face, prima facie established a severe impairment of physical mobility, he said. He further said that the statute casts an absolute public duty and it leaves no residual administrative discretion to summarily decline the exercise. The lawful course of action was for the registering officer to conduct an immediate inquiry or depute an official for local verification to resolve any doubts. "Instead, your office treated the mere omission of the specific phrase bed rest in the medical discharge summary as absolute, conclusive proof of fitness. This perverse shifting of the evidentiary burden onto a medically distressed family inverted the statutory scheme and is legally unsustainable," the commissioner said. The communication said the objection raised by your DC's office regarding antecedent proof of mental fitness rests on a profound conceptual fallacy. "By demanding definitive diagnostic proof of fitness as a condition precedent to admission, your office effectively abdicated its statutory duty and unlawfully closed the doors of administrative relief. Also, objections raised regarding the underlying agreement dated Feb 13, 2025 and the locus standi of the applicant were entirely premature, extra-jurisdictional and irrelevant at the threshold stage. A detailed examination of the underlying chain of title or the intrinsic validity of the agreement itself, should have been done strictly to the stage of formal presentation and substantive registration of the instrument and not at the introductory stage where relief under Sections 31 and 38 was sought,'' the commissioner wrote. Quoting a SC ruling, the commissioner said that the apex court in K Gopi vs the Sub-Registrar & Ors. (2025) explicitly held that the statutory inquiry permitted to a registering officer is strictly confined to the parameters of Sections 34 and 35 of the Act, namely, verifying the identity of the executing parties and the factum of execution. It has been reaffirmed that the registering officer possesses no inherent adjudicatory or judicial competence to scrutinize root titles or demand absolute title proofs as a condition precedent to registration. The commissioner has also asked the DC to mitigate the administrative prejudice caused to the deceased farmer's family by proactively facilitating the legal recourse available, if his legal heirs opted to pursue the matter. Sonepat DC Neha Singh had told HT that applications seeking registration of documents relating to the transfer of immovable property required careful scrutiny, particularly where the executant was stated to be suffering from serious illness, bodily infirmity or had recently undergone surgical procedures. "Such scrutiny was necessary to safeguard the rights of the landowner, ensure the voluntariness of the transaction and prevent disputes, allegations of fraud, undue influence or subsequent civil and criminal litigation," she said....