Governing Indian Law & Statutory Authority
Quick answer
An ordinary commercial agreement in India can normally be completed fully online. The document is prepared as a digital file, each signatory signs it with Aadhaar-based eSign, and the instrument is stamped with an e-stamp certificate obtained from the official state system before or at the time of execution. Nothing needs to be printed or posted. Three things limit that. First, four categories of document are wholly outside the Information Technology Act, 2000 under the First Schedule: a negotiable instrument other than a cheque or a narrow class of promissory note and bill of exchange issued to a regulated financial entity, a power of attorney (unless it empowers such an entity), a trust, and a will. For those, no electronic execution is available at all. Second, instruments that must be registered under the Registration Act, 1908 still require the executants to appear before the registering officer, which no amount of electronic signing changes. Third, e-stamping is a state-by-state scheme, and many states restrict it to listed instruments or cap the value, so the position must be checked for the state whose stamp law applies.
A signed contract used to require three physical things: a printer, a licensed stamp vendor, and a courier. None of the three is a legal requirement. What the law requires is that the parties agree, that the instrument is stamped where stamp law applies to it, and that there is reliable evidence of who signed what and when. For ordinary commercial agreements, Indian law now supports doing all of that electronically. Electronic signatures are recognised by the Information Technology Act, 2000, and the definition of "executed" in the Indian Stamp Act, 1899 was amended in 2019 to include the attribution of an electronic record. That second change is the one people miss, and it is the statutory bridge between the two statutes: for stamp-law purposes, signing electronically is execution. The scope is wider than it used to be, and narrower than the internet often suggests. A 2022 notification removed contracts for the sale or conveyance of immovable property from the IT Act's exclusion list, so the IT Act now applies to them. But four categories remain wholly outside the Act, and the single biggest obstacle to online property transactions is no longer the IT Act at all. It is the Registration Act, 1908, which still requires the executants to appear before the registering officer. This guide sets out what the law actually says, the practical signing sequence, how e-stamping is issued and what it costs, and where a physical step genuinely cannot be avoided.
Quick answer
- 01Electronic signatures and electronically formed contracts are recognised by the Information Technology Act, 2000.
- 02The Indian Stamp Act, 1899 defines "executed" to include attribution of an electronic record, which is what makes electronic execution count for stamp purposes.
- 03E-stamping rests on state e-stamping rules made under the stamp legislation, not on a single central provision.
- 04The stamp must be in place before or at the time of execution, or Section 35 creates an admissibility problem.
- 05Four categories in the IT Act's First Schedule cannot be executed electronically at all: most negotiable instruments, private powers of attorney, trusts and wills.
- 06Compulsory registration under the Registration Act, 1908 is now the principal obstacle to online property transactions, not the IT Act.
- 07Which instruments may be e-stamped, and the charge for doing so, varies by state and changes by notification.
What the law actually requires of a signed agreement
An agreement governed by Indian law rests on the Indian Contract Act, 1872. Section 10 requires free consent, competent parties, lawful consideration, a lawful object, and that the agreement is not expressly declared void. Nothing in that section requires a signature at all, let alone a handwritten one. Signature is evidence of assent, not a separate legal ingredient. The Information Technology Act, 2000 then removes the assumption that assent has to be recorded on paper, and the provisions do different jobs that are worth separating. Section 4 provides that where a law requires information to be in writing, that requirement is satisfied by an electronic record. Section 5 provides that where a law requires a signature, an electronic signature satisfies it, provided it is affixed in the manner prescribed by the Central Government. Section 10A is a different provision again: it addresses the validity of contracts formed through electronic means, and provides that a contract shall not be deemed unenforceable solely because it was formed electronically. Section 11 governs the attribution of an electronic record, and it is the section the stamp statute expressly cross-refers to. Section 13 deals with the time and place of despatch and receipt of an electronic record, not with enforceability. Aadhaar-based eSign operates one step further down the chain. Section 3A permits authentication by an electronic signature or electronic authentication technique that is reliable and specified in the Second Schedule to the Act. The Second Schedule is not an exclusion list: it is titled "Electronic signature or electronic authentication technique and procedure", and it has been populated by notification. The originating instrument for Aadhaar eSign is the Electronic Signature or Electronic Authentication Technique and Procedure Rules, 2015, notified as G.S.R. 61(E) dated 27 January 2015, which inserted the e-authentication technique using Aadhaar e-KYC services. A 2020 notification added a second technique based on a trusted third party holding the subscriber's key, which is the basis on which remote and cloud eSign now works. One clarification that prevents a great deal of confusion: Aadhaar eSign is an electronic signature technique that produces a digital signature. Because the specified technique operates by way of a short-validity digital signature certificate issued by a licensed Certifying Authority, eSign is not an alternative to a digital signature certificate. It is a way of obtaining and using one, with a different identity-proofing route and a much shorter certificate life.
The First Schedule: the four documents electronic execution does not cover
Section 1(4) of the Information Technology Act, 2000 provides that nothing in the Act applies to the documents or transactions specified in the First Schedule, and it empowers the Central Government to amend that Schedule by notification. The exclusion is total: for a document in the First Schedule, the entire Act falls away, not merely the signature provisions. The First Schedule originally listed five entries. A Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology notification, S.O. 4720(E) dated 26 September 2022, made three changes: it narrowed entry 1, added a carve-out to entry 2, and omitted entry 5 entirely. The position today is as follows. Entry 1 covers a negotiable instrument as defined in the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881, other than a cheque, and other than a demand promissory note or a bill of exchange issued in favour of or endorsed by an entity regulated by the Reserve Bank of India, the National Housing Bank, SEBI, IRDAI or PFRDA. Entry 2 covers a power of attorney, but excluding one that empowers such a regulated entity to act on the executant's behalf. Entry 3 covers a trust as defined in the Indian Trusts Act, 1882. Entry 4 covers a will as defined in the Indian Succession Act, 1925, including any other testamentary disposition. Entry 5, which had covered any contract for the sale or conveyance of immovable property or any interest in such property, was omitted. Four practical consequences follow, and each of them corrects something that is still widely repeated. A will and a trust cannot be executed electronically at all, and nothing in a signing platform changes that. A will additionally requires attestation by two or more witnesses under Section 63 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925, which the IT Act does not address. A private power of attorney cannot be executed electronically, which is why authorising a representative in India from abroad still involves a physical document and, where it will be used in India, attestation or apostille as the recipient requires. A power of attorney in favour of a bank or other regulated financial entity is in a different position, because the 2022 notification brought that category back within the Act. A promissory note remains outside the Act unless it is a demand promissory note in favour of, or endorsed by, a regulated financial entity. So a private loan documented by a promissory note between individuals is still executed on stamp paper with a wet signature, while a demand promissory note in favour of a bank or NBFC can now be executed electronically. This is what made fully digital secured lending workable on platforms used by lenders. Contracts for the sale or conveyance of immovable property are no longer excluded from the IT Act, so electronic signatures on them are recognised. The internet has not caught up with that change, and a great deal of commentary still states the pre-2022 position. But the change means much less in practice than it appears to, for the reason set out below.
E-stamping: what an e-stamp certificate is and why timing matters
Stamp duty is a tax on the instrument, levied under the Indian Stamp Act, 1899 centrally and under state stamp legislation in each state. It is worth being precise about how e-stamping fits into that framework, because a common and confident-sounding error circulates on the point. There is no provision in the central Indian Stamp Act, 1899 that establishes e-stamping or provides for an e-stamp certificate. Anyone citing a central "Section 10A on e-stamp certificates" is citing something that does not exist: the central Act runs from Section 9A and 9B to Section 10 and Section 11, and the only Section 10A in the Act is a state amendment in Assam and Meghalaya dealing with paying duty in cash when stamps run short, which has nothing to do with e-stamping. The real basis is different, and simpler. Section 10 of the Indian Stamp Act, 1899 requires duty to be paid and the payment to be indicated on the instrument by means of stamps, either as the Act provides or, where the Act specifies no provision, "as the State Government may by rule direct". That delegation in Section 10(1)(b) is the hook. Each state that operates e-stamping has made rules under its own stamp legislation, and the e-stamp certificate is the mode of indicating payment that those rules prescribe. Gujarat's scheme, for example, rests on the Gujarat Stamp (Payment of Duty by Means of E-Stamping) Rules, 2014, read with a Revenue Department notification of 16 November 2021 made under Section 10 of the Gujarat Stamp Act, 1958. The same 2019 amendments that enlarged the definition of "instrument" also amended the definition of "executed", and this second change is the provision that makes the whole electronic route coherent. Section 2(12) of the Indian Stamp Act, 1899, as amended by the Finance Act, 2019 with effect from 1 July 2020, now provides that "executed" and "execution", used with reference to instruments, mean "signed" and "signature" and include the attribution of an electronic record within the meaning of Section 11 of the Information Technology Act, 2000. For stamp-law purposes, executing an instrument electronically is execution. That is why the timing rule applies to electronic execution in exactly the same way as to a wet-signed document. Two things about stamping catch people out. The first is timing. Section 17 of the Indian Stamp Act, 1899 requires all instruments chargeable with duty and executed in India to be stamped before or at the time of execution. An instrument that is executed first and stamped later runs into Section 35, which makes an insufficiently stamped instrument inadmissible in evidence, and also bars it from being acted upon, registered or authenticated by a public officer. The proviso to Section 35 allows the deficiency to be made good on payment of the duty together with a penalty, but that is a cure for a dispute rather than a plan, and it does not cure the registration bar, because an unstamped instrument cannot be registered in the first place. Because an e-stamp certificate is dated and serialised, it also has the useful property of proving exactly when the stamping happened. The second is that e-stamping is not uniformly available for every instrument in every state, and the restriction operates differently from how it is usually described. It is not generally a monetary threshold. It is a restriction by article, meaning that each state permits e-stamping only for the categories of instrument it has listed, and the lists differ sharply between states. One large state's permitted list covers around a dozen articles and excludes leases and conveyances entirely, which is precisely why property instruments are usually the ones that still require physical stamping even where e-stamping is otherwise available. Availability can also contract rather than expand. Instruments can be deactivated from a state's permitted list, and one recent communiqué deactivated article codes across sixteen states with effect from a single date. The honest position is that availability and the rate both have to be confirmed for the specific instrument and the specific state on the day, not assumed from a template or from an article that was accurate when it was written.
How e-stamping is issued, and what it costs
E-stamping is not a competitive market, and the reason is structural. A Central Record Keeping Agency is appointed to issue and record e-stamp certificates, and for a large group of states that agency is the Stock Holding Corporation of India Limited. In other states the state government runs its own portal. The terms "Central Record Keeping Agency" and "authorised collection centre" belong to the administrative and state-rule framework rather than to the central statute, but the effect is the same: a private platform offering to "e-stamp" a document is generally a front end connected to one of those systems, not an alternative issuer. None of them can reduce the stamp duty, because the duty is a tax fixed by the state's stamp legislation for the category of instrument. What can vary is the facilitation charge, which is the service fee for issuing the certificate and is entirely separate from the stamp duty. As of January 2026, the facilitation charge in the states and union territories where the central agency acts as Central Record Keeping Agency is Rs. 10 per transaction, revised upward from Rs. 7, and the National e-Governance Services Limited has correspondingly revised its own digital document execution fee structure. On an instrument carrying meaningful duty, that charge is a rounding error. On a nominal-duty agreement, it can be a large percentage of the total, which is the only situation in which the choice of route changes the arithmetic. Physical stamp paper is a different proposition. It is bought from a licensed stamp vendor who is remunerated through the system, so the paper costs more than its face value. Franking at an authorised bank branch impresses the duty onto the document instead of using pre-printed paper, and some states cap the value that may be franked, so it is not available for every instrument. The conclusions that follow are simple. For a one-off agreement, the cheapest route is the state's own e-stamping portal or the central agency's public system, used directly, because nothing sits between the payer and the issuer. For a business or a practice stamping agreements regularly, the same route remains cheapest per document, because there is no subscription, no annual fee and no onboarding deposit, and the facilitation charge is levied per certificate rather than per user. Setup cost only arises if a business chooses to become an authorised collection centre, which is a different proposition altogether: it requires infrastructure, connectivity and a formal appointment, in exchange for a share of the commission on the duty collected, and it makes sense only for an entity that already handles stamping at volume as part of a wider service. Two cautions before relying on any figure. The facilitation charge is notified and has been revised, so confirm the current amount on the portal or the agency's circular before quoting it to anyone. And the charge is the small number: the stamp duty is the large one, and the way to reduce the total legitimately is to get the instrument category right, because an agreement categorised correctly can attract materially less duty than the same transaction written up as a different instrument.
How to establish the correct duty for your instrument
Because the duty depends on the category of the instrument and on the state, the reliable method is a short sequence rather than a figure from an article. First, identify the instrument. A loan agreement, a guarantee, an indemnity, a lease, a service agreement and an appointment letter can all be categorised differently, and a settlement agreement should not be confused with a settlement of property on trust, which stamp legislation treats as an entirely separate and much more expensive category. Second, identify the state whose stamp law applies. This is usually the state where the instrument is executed or where the property is situated, and it is not always the state where the parties are. Third, find the article. The schedule to the Indian Stamp Act, 1899 sets out the central rates for the categories it covers, and each state's own stamp legislation sets out its rates for the rest, often with a residuary article for agreements not otherwise provided for. Fourth, check whether the state permits e-stamping for that instrument, whether it caps the value, and what the current facilitation charge is. Fifth, and this is the step people skip, stamp it before or at the time of execution. Everything above is planning; this is the step that determines whether the instrument can be produced in evidence if it is ever disputed.
The signing sequence, step by step
For a document that can be completed online, the sequence below is the one that keeps the stamp valid and the evidence clean. First, settle the final text. The version that is signed must be the version that was agreed. Circulating a fresh draft after a signature has been collected creates an argument about which text the signature attaches to. Second, identify the correct stamp category and the correct state. Stamp duty attaches by instrument category and by the state whose stamp law governs. A service agreement and a lease are categorised differently, and the same instrument can attract different duty in two states. Third, obtain the e-stamp certificate before or at execution. The certificate is generated for the instrument and carries the parties' details. An e-stamp certificate for the wrong instrument, or one obtained after execution, defeats the purpose. Fourth, place the certificate particulars in the document. The e-stamp certificate reference, the stamp duty amount and the date are incorporated into the agreement itself, so the instrument and the certificate point to each other. Fifth, route the document for electronic signature. In a two-party agreement the usual order is the party who is not drafting first, then the counterparty, or both in parallel where the platform supports it. Each signatory authenticates with Aadhaar eSign and receives a completed copy. Sixth, keep the audit trail with the executed document. The signature certificate and the audit log are the evidence of execution. Storing the signed PDF without the trail is storing half the proof. On witnesses, the position is more limited than most descriptions suggest. Ordinary commercial agreements, including service agreements, NDAs, employment agreements, loan agreements, guarantees and non-court settlements, have no statutory witness requirement at all: witnesses are a matter of drafting convention and evidential prudence, not validity. Where a statute does require attestation, the requirement is untouched by the Act, and whether a statutorily required attesting witness may sign electronically is not settled. There is also a structural point worth thinking about: attestation is only meaningful if the witness saw the executant sign, and in a sequential electronic workflow where each signer signs at a different time and place, whether a remote witness can be said to have done so is precisely the question that has not been answered.
Documents that cannot be completed fully online
Being straight about the exceptions is more useful than a blanket claim that everything can be done online. There are four reasons a matter stays partly physical, and they are independent of each other. The First Schedule to the Information Technology Act, 2000. A will, a trust, a power of attorney that does not empower a regulated financial entity, and a negotiable instrument outside the narrow carve-in for demand promissory notes and bills of exchange in favour of such entities. For these, the entire Act falls away, so no electronic signature, no electronic record and no platform feature can help. Only a further notification under Section 1(4) can change it. Compulsory registration under the Registration Act, 1908. This is now the principal obstacle to online property transactions, and it is the point on which the 2022 amendment to the First Schedule delivers less than it appears to. Section 17(1) makes registration compulsory for instruments of gift of immovable property, for non-testamentary instruments creating or transferring an interest in immovable property of the requisite value, and for leases from year to year or for a term exceeding one year or reserving a yearly rent. Section 34(1) then provides that no document shall be registered unless the persons executing it, or their representatives, assigns or agents authorised as aforesaid, appear before the registering officer, and Section 35(1) requires those persons to appear personally and admit execution. The IT Act permits the electronic signature; the Registration Act requires the appearance; and the second is untouched by the first. It is worth addressing directly the assumption that some state has already solved this. On the evidence available, no state has been verified as permitting a lease beyond one year or a sale deed to be completed with zero physical appearance. States that have moved furthest still retain a physical step: one state's advanced online registration route expressly requires a single in-person visit for final biometrics and deed execution, another's faceless route covers only specified categories of instrument, and a third's presence-less route is limited to four deed types. Several states, Gujarat among them, have amended their registration law to accommodate documents presented by electronic means, so the position is genuinely state-specific and improving. But the accurate description is a reduced number of visits, not none. One further point that is often assumed wrongly in the other direction: attesting witnesses are not required to appear before the registering officer. Sections 34(1) and 35(1) are directed at the executants, and no central provision requires a witness to appear or to sign the registration endorsement. The appearances that are required are those of the executants and of the person presenting the document, and for a transfer of ownership of immovable property the photograph and fingerprints of each buyer and seller are required under Section 32A. Some states have added their own witness-identity requirements on top, so the position should be checked locally. Notarisation. There is no nationwide framework in India for notarising a document electronically. Section 8 of the Notaries Act, 1952 requires the notarial act to be done under the notary's signature and official seal. Neither that section nor the rules made under the Act expressly requires the deponent to appear in person, but Indian courts have read personal execution into the notary's function, and no authority permits a virtual appearance either. So the honest position is that there is no express statutory mandate for physical appearance and no permission for the alternative, and in practice a notary's office will ordinarily expect the deponent to attend, particularly for an affidavit or an oath. What has begun to appear is case-specific judicial permission rather than a rule. The Delhi High Court has, in two decisions in 2024, permitted the filing of electronically signed and electronically notarised affidavits and vakalatnamas where the signatory appeared before a Delhi notary through a video-based notarisation platform. Those are interlocutory permissions on the facts of particular matters. They are not a practice direction, they establish no general legal test, and they should not be read as a holding that electronic notarisation is valid in law. A separate and widespread error is worth flagging for anyone researching this: a 2025 Delhi High Court decision about a trade mark is sometimes cited online as authority on electronic notarisation, and on reading it is nothing of the kind. The IT Act does not cure this. Section 5 says that where a law requires a document to be signed, an electronic signature satisfies it, and it says nothing about a requirement that a document be notarised. The practical rule is therefore: if the document does not require notarisation, do not notarise it, because adding a notarial step to an ordinary commercial agreement converts a fully online transaction into a partly physical one for no legal gain. Adjudication. Where the duty is not a fixed sum and the value of the subject matter is indeterminate, Sections 31 and 32 of the Indian Stamp Act, 1899 provide for the Collector to adjudicate the proper duty and issue a certificate. That is a Collector-facing step, ordinarily involving physical lodgement, so a document that needs adjudication cannot realistically be completed online. The central Act sets no time limit for the Collector to decide, and although a court has imposed a limit on the Collector in one state, that is a judicial direction rather than a rule of general application. A document that needs adjudication should therefore be treated as carrying an uncertain timeline as well as a physical step. Two further points are often overlooked. Attestation requirements imposed by other statutes are not cured by the IT Act: a will requires two or more attesting witnesses under Section 63 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925, a gift of immovable property and a mortgage by registered instrument require attestation by at least two witnesses under Sections 123 and 59 of the Transfer of Property Act, 1882, and the IT Act's recognition of the parties' electronic signatures says nothing about the witnesses. Whether a statutorily required attesting witness may sign electronically is not settled, and it should be treated as open rather than assumed. Court-connected settlements are the other case: a compromise recorded by a court under the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, or an award of a Lok Adalat under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987, draws its force from the forum's record rather than from the parties' signatures, so the online part is the drafting and the negotiation, not the recording. One closing observation on reform. Both stamp law and registration law are the subject of proposed replacement legislation, with a draft Indian Stamp Bill and a consultation draft of a new Registration Bill both having circulated in recent years. Neither has been enacted. Anyone who needs to plan around the current position should plan around the law as it stands, and treat the proposals as an indication of direction rather than as a change in the rules.
How an agreement is handled end to end online
The work divides cleanly between what can be done remotely and what only the parties can do. The preparation: identifying which instrument the transaction actually needs, confirming the stamp category and the duty position for the relevant state, drafting the agreement so that the operative clauses match the commercial deal, and building the signature and stamping sequence into a checklist with dates. The execution: obtaining the e-stamp certificate from the official system for the relevant state, incorporating the certificate particulars into the instrument, routing the document for Aadhaar eSign in the right order, and collecting the signature certificates and audit trail alongside the executed file. The tail: where the instrument is registrable, preparing the file for registration and the Sub-Registrar appointment; where a bank or counterparty requires something further, identifying it before signature rather than after. The parties themselves sign, and they remain responsible for the accuracy of what they sign. Where a document falls into one of the excluded categories, or where registration, notarisation or adjudication is required, the physical step is identified at the start and built into the timeline, so that nobody discovers it after the agreement has already been signed.
Proving an electronically signed agreement later
Admissibility is where electronic execution is most often questioned, so it is worth understanding before a dispute rather than during one. The governing statute has changed: the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 has been repealed and replaced by the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, in force from 1 July 2024. Any current advice that cites Sections 65A and 65B of the Evidence Act is citing provisions that no longer exist. The mapping is worth getting right, because the two old sections did different things. What was Section 65B of the Evidence Act is now Section 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, dealing with the admissibility of electronic records and the certificate that supports them. What was Section 65A is now Section 62, which deals with how the contents of electronic records are proved. Section 66 of the new Act corresponds to the old Section 67A on proof as to electronic signature, and Section 65 corresponds to the old Section 67 on proof of signature and handwriting. Two consequences follow for anyone relying on an electronically executed agreement. First, the certificate requirement is now more demanding on its face: the certificate is to be given by the person in charge of the computer or communication device and also by an expert, in the form set out in the Schedule to the Act, at each instance where the record is submitted for admission, and it must carry the hash value of the electronic record together with the algorithm used. Whether that certificate is mandatory in every case or may be dispensed with is a question the Supreme Court has expressly left open, so it should not be treated as finally settled either way. Second, and this is the part within the parties' control, the executed agreement should be preserved as a package rather than a single file: the final signed PDF, the signature certificate for each signatory, the audit trail, the e-stamp certificate, and the correspondence showing the version that was agreed. Deleting the platform account, or storing only a flattened scan, weakens the evidence trail that made the electronic execution worthwhile in the first place.
Where the law on the books and practice on the ground diverge
One caution deserves its own section, because it is the most common practical surprise and it has nothing to do with the strength of the legal position. An electronic signature can be perfectly valid and still be refused by the system that is supposed to accept it. The Controller of Certifying Authorities, the regulator for digital signatures in India, issued an advisory on 15 July 2025 recording that subscribers were complaining that valid digital signature certificates were not being accepted in certain application systems, and stating that individual enrolment or separate acceptance mechanisms for each certifying authority's certificate are not required under the legal framework. That is the regulator, in its own words, documenting a gap between what the law requires and what some portals and counterparties do in practice. The practical response is to ask the recipient what it will accept, before the document is signed rather than after. Banks, registries, government portals and some large counterparties each have their own onboarding requirements, and those requirements are operational rather than legal. Where a document has to be filed with a particular authority, that authority's practice governs the choice of signature method, whatever the statute says. There is a related point on evidence. The direct Indian authority on point comes from the Delhi High Court, which held that once an electronic bid was digitally signed, that signature resulted in the authentication of each and every document comprising the electronic record, and that a separate requirement of physical signature was a surplusage. That is a useful and encouraging decision, but it is a decision on particular facts, and it is the sort of point on which a party should still expect to have to explain its execution process rather than simply assert validity.
The mistake that causes the most trouble
The most common and most avoidable error is signing first and stamping later. It happens because the stamping step feels administrative, and because the parties are keen to have something signed. But stamp law cares about sequence, and an instrument stamped after execution invites exactly the objection the stamping requirement exists to create. The second most common error is using a stamp category that does not match the instrument, usually because a template was reused. The third is assuming that the state position on e-stamping availability is uniform, when it is not. All three are cheap to avoid at the drafting stage and expensive to fix afterwards.
When to obtain a review
A review is especially useful when…
- — You are about to sign a commercial agreement and want it stamped correctly at the right time
- — You are dealing with a counterparty in another state or country and want to avoid printing and couriering
- — You are unsure whether your document can be e-signed at all, or whether it needs registration or notarisation
- — You want the executed file, signature certificates and e-stamp record kept together as usable evidence
Primary references
Official sources used for this guide
- Information Technology Act, 2000 - Sections 1(4), 3A, 4, 5, 10A and 11, and the First and Second Schedules↗
- S.O. 4720(E) dated 26 September 2022 - amendment of the First Schedule to the IT Act↗
- Electronic Signature or Electronic Authentication Technique and Procedure Rules, 2015 - G.S.R. 61(E) dated 27 January 2015↗
- Indian Stamp Act, 1899 - Sections 2(12), 10, 17, 18, 31, 32 and 35↗
- Indian Contract Act, 1872 - Section 10 (what agreements are contracts)↗
- Registration Act, 1908 - Sections 17, 34 and 35 (compulsory registration and appearance)↗
- Transfer of Property Act, 1882 - Sections 54, 59 and 123 (sale, mortgage and gift)↗
- Notaries Act, 1952 - Section 8 (functions of notaries)↗
- Controller of Certifying Authorities - eSign service and licensed Certifying Authorities↗
- Controller of Certifying Authorities - advisory of 15 July 2025 on acceptance of valid digital signature certificates↗
- National e-Governance Services Ltd - e-stamping facilitation charges and DDE circulars↗
- Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 - Sections 62, 63, 65 and 66 (electronic records and signatures)↗
Legal information notice
This article is general legal information, not legal advice. Whether a particular document can be executed or stamped electronically depends on the document type, the state whose stamp law applies, and the facts of the transaction. Take advice on your own matter, and verify current stamp duty rates and portal charges before you rely on any figure.