Pune: Property registrations across Maharashtra were thrown into disarray on Friday after the Government Receipt Accounting System (GRAS) portal — the mandatory platform for paying stamp duty and registration fees — suffered a major technical glitch. The system remained non-functional until late afternoon, leaving thousands of citizens stranded at sub-registrar offices.Frustrated citizens, many of whom had scheduled appointments weeks in advance, were forced to wait for hours or return home without completing their transactions. While the portal was eventually restored late in the day, the disruption caused a significant backlog.Officials from the state finance department, which manages the GRAS portal, confirmed the outage. “A technical issue hampered the system’s performance. It was resolved by an expert team by late afternoon,” an official stated.However, lack of communication added to the chaos. A senior citizen who travelled from Assam to register a newly purchased property waited for over three hours before giving up. “There was no prior intimation or message. Despite having a confirmed appointment, we received no update regarding the service failure,” she said.Real estate agents noted that such disruptions are becoming a recurring problem. “We frequently see issues with Aadhaar authentication or portal downtimes. Lack of an automated notification system for citizens is a major grievance,” one agent said.Citizen activist S. Joshi echoed these concerns, calling for better transparency. “Authorities must provide advance notice or real-time alerts when systems go offline. Many people travel from other states for these registrations, and such unplanned disruptions completely derail their schedules,” he said.The state registration department confirmed that document processing was at a standstill for most of the day. To mitigate the impact, some offices extended their working hours by 90 minutes.Abhay Mohite, DIG (IT) of the registration department, confirmed the restoration of the system. “Approximately 10,000 documents are registered daily in Maharashtra. Friday’s downtime will likely result in a dip in those figures,” Mohite said. He added that while some offices stayed open late to accommodate those waiting, many registrations have now been postponed to Saturday or Sunday.
