What is meant by Encumbrance (EC)?
Ans:-Encumbrance Certificate is a record showing registered transactions pertaining to a property.
If mortgage, sale or any other deeds in respect of an immovable property are registered, indexing will be done by the Registration Department and this indexing ultimately converted to generate an encumbrance certificate.
Encumbrance Certificates are issued by Sub Registrar and District Registrar Offices.
What can be understood by Nil EC?
If no deeds of transactions are registered in respect of a property mentioned in the application of EC, nil encumbrance certificate is issued.
If Certificate is issued in this form, it means that there are no registered transactions / liabilities on the property for a given period of time; and unregistered transactions are not included in this certificate since such details are not available with Registration Department.
People shall be very careful in filling the application form for EC, if they give incomplete/inaccurate details, then they may get a wrong EC.
Interested parties may approach the Sub Registrar and by paying statutory fee, can verify the records personally.
EC cannot be taken as a sole criterion to buy a property or lend money. It is better to undertake comprehensive study as suggested in “property purchase precautions”.