About

Why this service exists

I have been an NRI since birth. Tamil Nadu is where my family’s property is. It has never been where I live.

That combination is the whole problem. You inherit or buy land in a state whose registration system you have never navigated in person, recorded in documents you may not read fluently, at offices keeping hours you cannot attend from another country. Everyone assures you it is straightforward. It is not — and the people saying so have usually never tried it from eight time zones away.

Buying and selling property here is difficult enough for residents. From abroad it becomes something else: a problem you can only solve by taking leave, flying in, and discovering on arrival what should have been settled months earlier.

An e-Sevai centre was already operating in Tamil Nadu, doing this work daily for people who walk through the door — and it is one we are closely connected to, not one we went looking for. Extending it to serve the NRI community specifically was less a new idea than an obvious one. The expertise was already there. What was missing was someone at the other end of the phone who understood the position you are actually in — because it is also mine.

Who runs it

My name is Arvindh Selvam. I am based in Dubai.

I am the person you will actually be dealing with. Enquiries come to me, the assessment is mine, and if something goes wrong you have a name and a number rather than a support queue.

Being in Dubai is not incidental. It puts me in the same time zone as much of the Gulf’s Tamil community, close enough to India to call an office at a sensible hour, and far enough away that I hold property in a state I do not live in — which is the position you are in too.

Worth being clear about what that means, since I am in one country and your land is in another: the business operates in India. Every part of the service is carried out there, on property there, under Indian law. Dubai is where you reach me, not where anything happens. It is a phone number and a time zone, not a second office.

e-Sevai4NRI is currently run by me as an individual rather than through a registered company. That is a deliberate disclosure rather than an omission: you should know who is on the other end and what they are, and when it changes this page will say so.

The e-Sevai partnership

This is not a new business built on top of nothing. It operates as an extension of e-Sevai centres already running in Tamil Nadu — established operations doing this work daily for people who walk through the door. What has been added is the part that was missing: someone facing the people who cannot walk in, because they live eight time zones away.

Those centres are TNeGA-authorized, which is what allows the work to go through official channels rather than informally. They are run by retired sub-registration officers — people who spent their working lives on the other side of the counter, at the office where these documents are accepted or rejected.

That matters for one specific reason. The most expensive thing that can happen to an NRI land matter is a document being rejected after the flights are booked. Someone who spent a career rejecting documents knows what gets rejected, and can see it in your file before you board.

What that experience does not buy

It buys no influence. A retired officer has no authority over a serving one, cannot make an application move faster, and cannot have a requirement waived. If anyone offers you that, they are selling something else and you should decline it.

What it buys is accuracy — knowing what a file needs before it is submitted, rather than discovering it at the counter. That is the whole of it, and it is worth more than it sounds.

To be precise about the structure, because it decides where your documents go: the centre is a separate business from e-Sevai4NRI, not a department of it. The connection is close — this service exists as an extension of that centre’s work, not as an unrelated broker who found a useful contact. But they are distinct entities, which is why the privacy policy describes your documents as being shared with the centre rather than staying in one pair of hands. We would rather state that plainly than let “partner” do vague work.

Our own role is narrower. We are the point of contact abroad: we assess your case, prepare and check the documentation, coordinate with the centre, and keep you informed in a time zone that suits you. The centre and the relevant government offices carry out the official transaction. We do not, and cannot, do that part ourselves.

The centre has operated in Thanjavur district — Tanjore — for more than twenty years. That is where the work is based and where its record sits. Through it we can also act in neighbouring districts, Tiruchirappalli among them.

Twenty years in one district is worth more here than a wider footprint would be. Registration practice is local: the documents a particular office expects, the corrections it insists on, the way its queues actually move. That knowledge does not generalise, and it is not something a new operation can acquire quickly.

What we are not

We are not a government body, and we are not affiliated with or endorsed by TNeGA or the Tamil Nadu Registration Department. We are not a law firm and we do not give legal or tax advice.

Where your case needs a qualified professional, we will say so and can point you toward one, rather than attempting work we are not qualified to do.

How we think about this work

Most people who contact us have been putting this off for years, often because the last attempt went badly — an agent who stopped replying, a relative who took offence, a trip that achieved nothing.

So we try to be predictable rather than impressive. Written scope before payment. Fees separated from government charges. Bad news delivered early rather than late. If a case can't be done, we say so before taking money for it.