Section 269P — Statement to be Furnished in Respect of Transfers of Immovable Property

CHAPTER XX-A — ACQUISITION OF IMMOVABLE PROPERTIES IN CERTAIN CASES OF TRANSFER TO COUNTERACT EVASION OF TAX

Section 269P — Statement to be furnished in respect of transfers of immovable property

Case Laws & Commentary — Income-tax Act, 1961 (as amended by the Finance Act, 2026) — bharattax.co Treatise

Status: Historic / spent. Chapter XX-A was inserted by the Taxation Laws (Amendment) Act, 1972, with effect from 15 November 1972, and does not apply to transfers of immovable property made after 30 September 1986 (section 269RR). It stands superseded by Chapter XX-C and, for current transactions, by section 50C / section 56(2)(x).

Finance Act, 2026: No amendment. The Finance Act, 2026 does not touch any provision of Chapter XX-A.

Mechanism: Obliges the registering officer, before registering certain instruments of transfer, to obtain a statement (in the prescribed form, Form 37EE) from the transferor and transferee, and to forward it — feeding information to the competent authority.

Litigation profile: Information-gathering provision binding registering officers; no independent merits litigation.

A. COMMENTARY

Information feed

Section 269P made the registration process the Chapter's intelligence net: the registering officer was to take a prescribed statement from the parties at registration and forward it, so the competent authority could spot undervalued transfers within the nine-month window of section 269D. It complements the limitation mechanism by ensuring the department learns of transfers promptly.

Candour

The provision is administrative and addressed to registering officers; it generated no merits jurisprudence of its own. Its relevance is systemic — it explains how acquisition cases were detected and how the section 269D clock was set running.

B. STATUTORY TEXT (verbatim)

Reproduced verbatim from the Income-tax Act, 1961, as amended up to the Finance Act, 2025 (the Finance Act, 2026 makes no change). Page-header/footer artefacts of the source PDF have been removed; wording, clause-lettering and punctuation are unaltered.

Statement to be furnished in respect of transfers of immovable property.

269P. (1) Notwithstanding anything contained in any other law for the time being in force, no registering officer appointed under the Registration Act, 1908 (16 of 1908), shall register any document which purports to transfer any immovable property belonging to any person unless a statement in duplicate in respect of such transfer, in the prescribed form and verified in the prescribed manner and setting forth such particulars as may be prescribed, is furnished to him along with the instrument of transfer :

Provided that the provisions of this sub-section shall not apply in relation to any document which purports to transfer any immovable property for an apparent consideration not exceeding fifty thousand rupees.

Explanation.—For the purposes of this proviso, "apparent consideration" shall have the meaning assigned to it in clause (a) of section 269A subject to the modifications that for the expressions "immovable property transferred" and "instrument of transfer" occurring in that clause, the expressions "immovable property purported to be transferred" and "document purporting to transfer such immovable property" shall, respectively, be substituted.

(2) The registering officer shall, at the end of every fortnight, forward to the competent authority,—

(a) one set of the statements received by him under sub-section (1) during the fortnight ; and

(b) a return in the prescribed form and verified in the prescribed manner and setting forth such particulars as may be prescribed in respect of documents of the nature referred to in sub-section (1) which have been registered by him during the fortnight.

C. AUTHORITIES

Candour rule: an information-gathering provision addressed to registering officers; no direct authority. Cognate decisions explain the limitation/initiation machinery it serves.

Cognate — detection and the limitation/initiation machinery

CIT v. Smt. Vimlaben Bhagwandas Patel and Smt. Kamlaben Kanjibhai Patel — [1979] 118 ITR 134 (Gujarat) (decided 25 January 1979)

Facts Notice under section 269D(1) initiating acquisition of two industrial sheds transferred below the competent authority's estimate of fair market value; the transferee challenged initiation.

Held The leading judgment on Chapter XX-A. The acquisition machinery is expropriatory and penal in character and must be construed strictly. Initiation under section 269C(1) requires the competent authority to entertain reason to believe BOTH limbs of the 'twin conditions' — (i) that the fair market value exceeds the apparent consideration (understatement), and (ii) that the consideration was not truly stated with the ulterior object in clause (a) or (b) (reduction/evasion of the transferor's tax or concealment by the transferee). The statutory presumptions in section 269C(2) belong to the post-initiation adjudicatory stage (section 269F) and cannot supply the reason to believe at the threshold.

Also Where the authority records more than one ground, the initiation is not vitiated merely because one ground is later found defective, so long as a valid ground survives. Reasons must have a rational nexus with the material.

Smt. Bani Roy Chowdhury v. Competent Authority, Inspecting Assistant Commissioner of Income-tax, Acquisition Range II — [1978] 112 ITR 111 (Calcutta); per Ramendra Mohan Datta J (decided 18 June 1976)

Held The presumptions in section 269C(2) operate only at the stage of adjudication of objections and cannot be pressed into service to form the 'reason to believe' for initiation under section 269C(1); at that threshold the authority must possess material independent of the statutory presumptions.

Also Simultaneously anchoring the belief to both clauses (a) and (b) of section 269C(1) betrayed non-application of mind; the authority had wrongly treated a confirming party (Hindusthan Building Society Ltd.) as a transferor, and had relied on irrelevant advertisements/comparables for fair market value.

Result The section 269D(1) notice was quashed — an early and influential statement of the procedural discipline governing Chapter XX-A.