LAHORE: The Punjab government has rolled back its recently introduced requirement that property buyers and sellers obtain a Green Property Certificate (GPC) before completing land transactions, restoring the traditional Fard, or Record of Rights, as a valid transactional document across most of the province.
The reversal was formalised through a notification issued by the Punjab Land Records Authority (PLRA), invoking its powers under the Punjab Land Records Authority Act, 2017. The order declares the “Naqal Arazi Record” a legally recognised document for property transactions, effectively ending the compulsory GPC regime introduced just weeks earlier.
The Green Property Certificate became mandatory on July 1, 2026, for all sales, purchases, mortgages, gifts, and other transfers of immovable property in Punjab. It was billed as a flagship reform meant to digitise and modernise the province’s land administration system, gradually replacing the long-standing Fard-e-Bai.ย
To implement it, the PLRA deployed teams of surveyors, five per tehsil, and fifty across Lahore’s ten tehsils, tasked with physically verifying ownership and location before certificates could be issued, following a mandatory 15-day public objection period.
Officials say the rollback does not eliminate the GPC system entirely. Instead, its scope has been narrowed: the certificate will remain mandatory only in areas where land records have already been digitised, while manual Fard issuance resumes in regions where digitisation is not yet complete.
The abrupt policy shift, coming barely ten days after the certificate’s mandatory rollout, has raised questions about the pace and readiness of Punjab’s digital land-record transition. Authorities have not indicated whether the GPC will eventually be reinstated province-wide once digitisation is completed in remaining districts.
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