Mutation, Khata and Title: Three Records People Treat as One

Three records get spoken about as though they were one document with three names, and the confusion is the root of most “the property is still in someone else’s name” panics. They are three separate registers, kept by three different offices, for three different purposes. Once you can name which is which, a vague fear turns into three checkable questions.

Three registers, three purposes, three offices

Mutation: what it updates, and which office does it

Mutation is the revenue record catching up with something that already happened. A sale is registered, an owner dies, a family partitions a holding, a court passes a decree — and the record of rights has to be brought into line.

In Karnataka the framework sits in the Karnataka Land Revenue Act, 1964. Section 127 provides for the record of rights to be maintained. Section 128 requires a person who acquires a right to report the acquisition to the prescribed officer within three months. Section 129 provides for the register of mutations, in which the reported change is entered and then certified after the persons interested have had notice.

Two things follow. The first is that mutation is a reporting duty, not a favour: the obligation to report sits on the person who acquired the right. The second is that a mutation entry has weight — section 133 attaches a presumption of correctness to an entry in the record of rights until the contrary is proved — but weight is not proof, and the presumption can be displaced by the instruments.

Mutation in this sense is a land record. If you have bought an apartment, there is no record of rights for your unit; the equivalent updating happens in the local body’s register, which is the next one.

Khata: the municipal account

A khata is an entry in the register a local body keeps in order to assess and collect property tax. It records who is assessed, for what property, at what measurement, in which ward or panchayat.

That is genuinely useful information. It is also the full extent of what a khata is evidence of. It is not adjudicated, it is not a finding about ownership, and a body issuing one is not certifying the file behind it. A khata can exist over a title chain with a gap, and the register will not know.

The tier decides the name and the office: a khata certificate and extract from a corporation or a municipal council, Form 9 and Form 11 from a grama panchayat.

Title: the registered instrument, and why it outranks both

India registers documents, not title. A deed is presented, section 17 of the Registration Act, 1908 decides whether it had to be registered, the registering officer registers it, and the books record that this happened.

The consequence is the whole architecture of Indian conveyancing. Because there is no state guarantee of title, ownership is demonstrated rather than certified — by producing an unbroken sequence of registered instruments running back to a mother deed. And because section 49 of the same Act provides that a document required to be registered and not registered shall not affect the immovable property comprised in it, an unregistered paper is not a link in that sequence at all.

This is why title outranks the other two records. Mutation and khata describe what the state’s administrative registers currently say. The instruments are what the state’s registers were describing.

What it means when the three disagree

• Deed in your name, revenue record in the seller’s. Ordinary, and usually just a lag — the mutation has not been reported or not yet certified. It becomes serious only if it is left, because the next buyer’s search will show the mismatch.
• Khata in your name, no registered instrument behind it. Not ordinary. A municipal account is not a source of ownership, and this pattern needs the chain of instruments produced before anything else.
• Revenue record shows an extent the deed does not. A sub-division, a partition, an acquisition or an error. The survey sketch and the sub-division record for that survey number is where the answer sits.
• A third name in the revenue record entirely. A link document exists somewhere — a will, a decree, a succession entry, a release — and until it is produced, the chain has a gap in it rather than a clerical problem.

The order they change in after a sale

1. The sale deed is registered. This is the transfer.
2. The revenue record is mutated, where the property is land — on a report by the person who acquired the right, followed by the entry and its certification.
3. The local body’s register is updated — the khata transfer, applied for with the registered deed, the earlier khata, the tax receipts and the encumbrance certificate.

They run in that order because each rests on the one before it. Nothing in the sequence is automatic, and none of the three offices tells the other two.

Which one a lender asks for, and which one a court reads

A lender asks for all three, and for the encumbrance certificate, because it is pricing risk: the instruments show the chain, the revenue record and the khata show whether the administrative position matches it, and the encumbrance search shows what the register has been told about charges.

A court, asked who owns the property, reads the instruments. The administrative entries are evidence of what a department recorded, and section 133 of the Karnataka Land Revenue Act, 1964 gives a record-of-rights entry a presumption of correctness — but a presumption yields to the documents that created the rights.

So the practical rule for a buyer is this. Get all three right, in order, and do not accept one as a substitute for another. Where the three agree, you have a clean position. Where they differ, the instrument is the record that decides — and the other two are telling you which question to ask next.

Each of these registers is defined in the glossary, the order the documents come in is set out in the buyer guide, and the record-keeping questions buyers ask most often are answered in the legal section of the FAQ.