Maharashtra is looking to bring in legislation that can potentially unlock an estimated ₹50 lakh crore in dormant real estate wealth. The recent announcement made by the Honourable Maharashtra Chief Minister during the Global FinTech Fest (GFF) can potentially create a UPI-like change in the real estate industry.
The proposed Maharashtra Digitisation and Exchange of Land Token Assets (DELTA) Act seeks to create a legal and technological framework through which land and other immovable assets can be digitally represented and potentially transacted using tokens. The state has indicated that it intends to work with institutions such as SEBI, NSE and BSE as it develops the framework, with the stated ambition of becoming the first in India to establish such a regime.
This deserves attention not because blockchain is fashionable, but because real estate remains one of the world’s least liquid and least divisible asset classes, with transactions that are heavily documentation-intensive.
If Maharashtra gets the architecture right, tokenisation could eventually do something much more valuable than digitise records: it could make property easier to buy, sell, finance and use as collateral. That is the real deal.
We have looked at this initiative as a three-step process:
- Digitisation: A paper land record becomes a trusted digital record.
- Tokenisation: A digital token represents a legally recognised ownership or economic interest in the underlying property.
- Exchangeability: That token can be transferred, pledged, financed or traded within a regulated ecosystem.
The first is largely a technology project. The second is a legal project. The third is a financial market transformation.
Maharashtra’s DELTA Act has the potential to address all three. But the sequencing is critical. The law must come before the token. While doing research on land tokenisation around the world, I found a few examples from which we can learn as we implement a great system.
Dubai has emerged as the most relevant international experiment. The Dubai Land Department (DLD) has moved beyond experimenting with blockchain-based records and is building a framework connecting property registration, tokenisation and regulated financial infrastructure. DLD has positioned tokenisation as a means of enabling fractional ownership and widening access in Dubai, enhancing the marketability of its real estate.
In February 2026, DLD entered Phase II of its real-estate tokenisation project, allowing secondary-market resale within a controlled pilot. Approximately 7.8 million real-estate tokens were included in the pilot. The results from the initial phase are striking.
In June 2025, a tokenised property project reportedly attracted 149 investors from 35 nationalities and was fully funded in under 2 minutes. (Refer Tokenized real-estate project / PRYPCO Mint announcements 2025)
The lesson for Maharashtra is to connect the government land registry with a legally enforceable digital asset, regulated market infrastructure and a mechanism for transfer.
The United Kingdom’s HM Land Registry experimented with blockchain and smart contracts through its Digital Street programme to make property transactions faster, more transparent and cheaper. The experiment demonstrated how smart contracts could potentially automate parts of a transaction, including the transfer of funds and the updating of the land register.
Tokenisation can allow an investor to buy ₹5 lakh of a ₹5 crore apartment. While that is quite possible, the much bigger opportunity for Maharashtra is credit. Consider a homeowner who owns a ₹2 crore property but needs ₹50 lakh. Today, a lender needs to check the title ownership, chain of title flow, existing mortgage or charges, registration records, property tax status, litigation, valuation, documentation, and the creation and registration of the new charge. Much of this process is fragmented across documents, departments, lawyers, valuers, registries and financial institutions, and takes a few weeks to complete.
Now imagine a future in which a property has a State-verified digital identity.
The lender can digitally establish:
Who owns it → What charges exist → Whether it can be pledged → What charge is being created
The loan itself could potentially trigger a smart-contract workflow that records the lender’s charge against the property on the blockchain ledger. That could materially reduce the time and friction involved in lending for a home loan, loan against property, top-up loan or mortgage refinancing.
This is where it can make a transformative difference to property owners and buyers and even help the government record these transactions. The buyer would not need to check all these things, as they would be digitally available from a trusted source. It could be offered as a paid service, where a citizen can request all the details by providing the unique property ID, and the relevant information can be fetched for the buyer/lender within a few seconds.
In a country where property transactions can be among the largest financial decisions in one’s lifetime, that could be truly transformative and make the process seamless.
Getting the legal architecture right
The legislation for the DELTA Act must clearly establish the relationship between the physical property, the government registry, the digital token and the legal rights of the token holder.
For example:
- If the token is transferred, does legal ownership automatically transfer?
- If the token is lost or stolen, who owns the property?
- If a court attaches the property, what happens to the tokens?
- If a mortgage is created, how is the lender’s charge reflected?
- If the underlying title is subsequently challenged, what happens to the token holders?
- Can a token be inherited?
- What happens if the registry and blockchain disagree?
- Who has the ultimate authority – the blockchain or the state?
These are indicative questions, and a lot more thought needs to go into making it useful at population scale.
My recommendation would therefore be for the DELTA framework to incorporate a government-verified property registry ID as the source of legal truth, with blockchain acting as the technology layer for authentication, transfer and auditability.
This could unlock productive capital and repurpose dormant wealth into economic opportunity.
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For India’s housing finance ecosystem, this could be particularly powerful. A faster, cleaner mortgage registration process can mean faster credit availability and potentially lower transaction costs. That is why the DELTA Act deserves to be viewed not as a blockchain initiative, but potentially as the beginning of a new digital property infrastructure for India.
Views expressed by: Mehernosh Tata, MD & CEO, Godrej Housing Finance – as a subsidiary of Godrej Capital
