Patta or Khata? Tamil Nadu and Karnataka Keep Two Different Records

A buyer looking at land on both sides of the Sarjapur–Hosur corridor is looking at two record systems, and the vocabulary does not carry across. The single most common consequence is small and expensive: someone asks a seller in Krishnagiri district for the khata, gets a blank look, and loses a week deciding whether the blank look means something is wrong.

It does not. There is no khata in Tamil Nadu, in the same way there is no patta in Karnataka. Here is what each record actually is, who issues it, and what to ask for on each side of the line.

The assumption that causes the problem

The assumption is that these are two names for one document — that a khata is what Karnataka calls the thing Tamil Nadu calls a patta, the way a lift is a lift and an elevator is a lift.

They are not translations of each other. They are two records produced by two different arms of government for two different reasons. One is kept by a local body because somebody has to be billed for property tax. The other is kept by the revenue administration because the state holds a register of land. Mapping one onto the other produces a request that cannot be met and a conclusion that is not warranted.

Khata: a Karnataka local-body account

A khata is the account a Karnataka local body maintains for a property — the municipal corporation in a city, the gram panchayat outside one. It records the property and the person liable to pay tax on it, and it is what a local body relies on when it deals with the property: tax, building approvals, transfers on its own register.

Because it is a local-body account, its form follows the local body. In Bengaluru buyers argue about A khata and B khata and about the electronic khata that replaced the paper one. Outside municipal limits, the gram panchayat records are the ones in play — the register and the property extract usually referred to by their form numbers, which we cover separately in the note on Form 9 and Form 11.

What a khata is not is a record of ownership. It records who the local body bills. That is a fact worth knowing about a property, and it is not a finding about title.

Patta: a Tamil Nadu revenue record of holding

A patta is the Tamil Nadu revenue record for a survey number: the person the revenue department shows as holding the land, with the extent and the classification recorded against that survey number and its subdivision. The pass book regime it belongs to rests on the Tamil Nadu Patta Pass Book Act, 1983, and the officer named in that Act is the Tahsildar having jurisdiction over the area in which the land is situated.

It travels with a small set of companion records. Chitta is the village-level account of the same holding, and the state now publishes View Patta / Chitta / FMB as a single service rather than as separate ones. The A-Register extract carries the settlement particulars for the survey number. The FMB sketch is the government's own measurement drawing of the parcel. The full definition, and how to read one, is in our post on what a patta is and what it proves.

What each proves about title — which is less than buyers think, in both cases

Neither record establishes ownership. That is the one thing they genuinely have in common, and it is the thing most often mis-stated on both sides of the border.

Ownership of immovable property is established by the chain of registered instruments. Section 17(1)(b) of the Registration Act, 1908 makes registration compulsory for a non-testamentary instrument that creates or transfers an interest in immovable property, and section 49 of that Act denies effect and evidentiary value to an unregistered one. The encumbrance certificate is what tests that chain, by showing what has been registered against the property over a stated period.

Read in that light, a khata tells you who is billed and a patta tells you what the revenue register records. Both are useful. Neither is a substitute for reading the deeds.

Which office issues each, and which portal holds each

This is the practical half, and it is where the wrong assumption costs time. The records live in different departments, in different states, on different portals — and a valid identifier searched on the wrong state's system returns nothing at all, which looks exactly like an absent record.

The row that catches people out is the encumbrance certificate. A Krishnagiri parcel has no entry on Karnataka's portal and never will. Searching there and finding nothing is not evidence of a clean title; it is evidence of the wrong portal.

The closer comparison nobody makes

If you want a genuine counterpart to patta in the Karnataka system, it is not the khata. It is the record of rights for the parcel — the RTC — because that is the revenue record of the holding, kept by the revenue administration, indexed by survey number, and changed by a mutation rather than by the registration of a deed.

Pair the records by the job they do and the mapping becomes obvious: revenue record to revenue record, tax account to tax account, survey drawing to survey drawing, register to register. Pair them by the word the seller happens to use and you end up asking a Tamil Nadu seller for a Karnataka document.

When a listing offers you the wrong state's document

Listings for land on this corridor are frequently written from a template, and the template is usually a Karnataka one because Bengaluru is where the traffic comes from. So a plot in Krishnagiri district gets advertised with a khata, a metropolitan planning approval and, occasionally, a Karnataka regulator's registration number.

None of those exist for that land. What it tells you is not necessarily that anything is wrong with the plot — it tells you that whoever wrote the listing did not check which state the land is in, which is a reason to check everything else yourself rather than a reason to walk away.

Three quick tests separate a template error from a substantive one. Ask for the survey number, revenue village and taluk: real land has all three and a template has none. Ask which register the project is on, and search that register yourself rather than reading a number off the page. And ask for the approved layout drawing, because the granting authority is printed on it and no template can supply that.

The pattern generalises. Any document named in a listing for Tamil Nadu land that only a Karnataka office could issue is a sentence that was copied, not a fact that was verified.

The one thing that behaves identically in both states

Registration does not update the other record. In Karnataka the khata transfer is a separate application to the local body; in Tamil Nadu the patta transfer is a separate proceeding before the Tahsildar. In both states the record keeps showing the seller until somebody files for the change, and in both states that somebody is the buyer.

It is the same trap with two different names, and it catches people moving in both directions.

A side-by-side list to carry to a site visit

Ask for the record the state actually issues. For land in Tamil Nadu, that is:

• Patta and chitta for the subdivision being sold, pulled from the state portal rather than accepted as a printout.
• The A-Register extract for the survey number.
• The FMB sketch, read with a surveyor.
• An encumbrance certificate from the Tamil Nadu register, for the plot and for the parent survey number.
• The approved layout drawing with its approval reference, and the project's registration on the Tamil Nadu register.

For land in Karnataka, the equivalent list is the record of rights, the mutation register extract, the survey documents, the encumbrance certificate from the Karnataka register, the khata, and the approval and registration for the project.

Neither list is longer than the other. They are simply different lists, and the mistake is not knowing that there are two. What else changes across this particular state line — regulator, registrar, portal, planning authority — is set out on the Karnataka versus Tamil Nadu comparison, and the terms themselves are defined in the property glossary.