BBMP, BMRDA, Town Panchayat or Gram Panchayat: Which Body Approves What

Buyers are handed approvals constantly and are almost never told what an approval is. A sheet arrives with a number, a seal and a body's name across the top, and the only question anyone thinks to ask is whether it exists. The more useful question is narrower: did the office that signed this have the power to sign it for this piece of land?

That question has a method behind it, and the method is the same in every tier. Three different kinds of body touch a property in Karnataka, they do three different jobs, and each job produces a different document. Once you can name the job, the mismatches become visible on sight.

Planning authority, local body, revenue department: three different roles

Start with the roles rather than the names, because the names change and the roles do not.

• The planning authority decides what may be done with land: whether a parcel may be developed at all, what use is permitted on it, and whether a proposed layout conforms to the plan for the area. Planning authorities in Karnataka are constituted for declared local planning areas under the Karnataka Town and Country Planning Act, 1961, and section 14 of that Act is the provision that makes permission necessary before land is developed or its use changed.
• The local body — a city corporation, a city or town municipal council, a town panchayat or a gram panchayat — is the government of the place. It sanctions building plans within its limits, maintains the property register, collects property tax, and certifies that a completed building matches what it permitted.
• The revenue department records who owns what and in what classification. It is the department that holds the survey record and the land register, and under section 95 of the Karnataka Land Revenue Act, 1964 it is the Deputy Commissioner who orders that agricultural land may be used for a non-agricultural purpose.

Nothing in that list is interchangeable. A revenue conversion order is not a planning permission. A planning permission is not a building sanction. A building sanction is not a title document, and none of the three tells you the seller owns the land.

Which body sanctions a building plan, and on what basis

A building plan is sanctioned by the local body for the address. Inside a city corporation's limits, that is the corporation. In a municipal council or town panchayat area, it is that council. In a village, it is the gram panchayat, working within the limits the Karnataka Panchayat Raj Act, 1993 sets for it and, where the land sits inside a declared planning area, subject to the planning authority's permission as well.

The basis of a sanction is always a rule book — the building bye-laws or zoning regulations in force for that authority. They set ground coverage, floor area ratio, setbacks by plot size and road width, height limits and parking. The reason two identical plots in two tiers can carry different sanctions is not favouritism; it is two different rule books.

What a sanction proves is narrow and worth saying plainly. It proves that a drawing was examined and permitted. It does not prove the drawing was followed.

Which body approves a layout, and what approval covers

A layout — land divided into plots with roads, drains and reserved open space — is approved by the planning authority for the area, not by the local body alone. The approval fixes the geometry: how wide the roads are, how much land is set aside as open space and civic amenity, where each plot sits and what each plot measures.

Three things a layout approval does not do, all of which buyers routinely assume it does:

1. It does not prove title. A planning authority examines a proposal against a plan. Ownership is a matter for the title chain and the encumbrance record, which sit in a different department entirely.
2. It does not prove the layout was built. Approval is permission to form roads and drains to a standard. Whether they were formed is a site question and, in most tiers, a separate release or completion step.
3. It does not register the project. Registration of a real estate project is a separate act under section 3(1) of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016, which bars a promoter from advertising, marketing, booking or selling in a project that falls within it until the project is registered with the regulator for that state.

Khata: who maintains it in each tier

Khata is the property account the local body keeps in order to tax you. It follows the tier, which is why the word means slightly different paperwork depending on where the property sits.

A khata is an account, not a title. It tells you who the local body is billing. It is still worth having in your own name promptly, because every later dealing — a plan sanction, a water connection, a resale — asks for it.

Occupancy and completion certificates: the issuing body follows the sanction

The office that sanctioned the plan is the office that certifies the finished building. That single rule resolves most of the confusion around these two documents.

A completion certificate records that construction is finished as sanctioned. An occupancy certificate records that the building may be occupied — the authority's own statement, after inspection, that what stands matches what it permitted and that the services it conditioned the sanction on are in place. Where a project is registered, section 17(1) of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 ties the handover of physical possession to the promoter executing a registered conveyance, which is a separate obligation from the certificate itself.

If a seller offers one of these on a letterhead that is not the sanctioning authority's, stop and ask why. There is sometimes an innocent answer — jurisdiction genuinely transferred between sanction and completion, which happens when limits are redrawn. But the answer should be in writing, with both documents attached.

How to tell whether an approval was issued by a body with jurisdiction

Four checks, in order, none of which needs a lawyer:

1. Read the survey number off the approval, not the address. An approval identifies land by survey number and village. A marketing address identifies it by whatever sells. Only one of those can be matched against a record.
2. Establish which state the survey number is in. This sounds absurd until you are on a corridor that crosses a state line, at which point it is the first thing to settle. Village and district on the revenue record answer it.
3. Establish the tier for that village. Corporation, council, town panchayat or gram panchayat — and whether the village falls inside a declared planning area, which is what decides whether a planning authority is in the picture at all.
4. Check the issuing body against both. The name on the approval should be a body that exists for that state and covers that tier. Where it is not, you have either a document from a different era or a document for different land.

One caution on the fourth check. Civic and planning bodies in Karnataka have been reorganised, renamed and had their limits redrawn more than once. An old approval carrying a body that no longer exists in that form is not automatically suspect — it is a fact about the date it was issued. What matters is whether that body had the power on that date, and which office holds the file today.

The mismatch that should stop a purchase

The pattern to watch for is a Karnataka authority's name attached to land that is not in Karnataka. It appears on listings for plots on the corridor running south-east out of Bengaluru, because the road keeps going after the state ends and the marketing does not change when it does.

A Karnataka metropolitan region authority is constituted by the Karnataka government for a region the Karnataka government defines. It cannot approve a layout in Krishnagiri district. Land on the Tamil Nadu side takes its planning approval from Tamil Nadu's directorate of town and country planning or the local planning authority for that area, its land record is a patta rather than a khata, and its project registration is with the Tamil Nadu regulator. SUYUG's own plotted community on that side of the line is registered with TNRERA, and the certificate names the authority — which is exactly the check being described here, run on our own paperwork. Every registration we hold is transcribed on the RERA page for you to verify against the register yourself.

The second mismatch worth naming: an approval for a neighbouring survey number. Approvals are granted for specific parcels. A layout approval covering survey numbers 27 and 28 says nothing about 29, even if 29 is inside the compound wall and has a show house on it.

What to ask for in writing when the tier is unclear

• The survey number, village, hobli and taluk of the land, as they appear on the revenue record.
• The name of the local body for that address, and whether the land falls inside a declared planning area.
• The layout approval, with its number and date, and the authority that issued it.
• The sanctioned building plan, where a structure is involved, and the completion or occupancy certificate for anything already built.
• The property account entry — khata or the village register extract — in the current owner's name.
• Where the land was agricultural, the conversion order under section 95 of the Karnataka Land Revenue Act, 1964.

Ask for all six in one message and keep the reply. A seller who can produce them has nothing to lose by doing so, and a seller who deflects has told you something the documents would have told you more slowly. The full purchase sequence, document by document, is set out in the buyer guide, and each term used here is defined in the glossary.