Patta: The Tamil Nadu Land Record a Bengaluru Buyer Has Never Asked For

A buyer who has bought a flat in Bengaluru arrives at a Tamil Nadu plot with a checklist, and the first item on it is the khata. There is no khata. There is a patta, it is not the same instrument, and the difference is not cosmetic — it changes which office you go to, which portal you search and which document you ask the seller for.

This is the anchor definition of the record that does the equivalent job on the other side of the state line, written for someone who has never needed it before.

What a patta is, in one sentence

A patta is the Tamil Nadu revenue record of the holding for a survey number: it names the person the revenue department shows as holding the land, and records the extent and the classification against that survey number and its subdivision.

Everything else about it follows from reading that sentence slowly. It is a revenue record, so it exists because the state assesses land, not because the state adjudicates ownership. It is indexed by survey number, not by a project name or a plot number, which is why a marketing brochure cannot be used to search for one. And it records a holding, which is a statement about the department's own register rather than a finding about title.

What it evidences, and why it is not a title document

The patta pass book regime rests on the Tamil Nadu Patta Pass Book Act, 1983 and the rules made under it. What that regime produces is a record generated from what the department already holds. It therefore carries forward the department's existing entries, and an error in the record is not corrected by the act of printing it.

Title is a different question, answered by different documents. Section 54 of the Transfer of Property Act, 1882 provides that a sale of tangible immovable property above the value stated in that section can be made only by a registered instrument, and 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. Section 49 of the same Act sets out the consequence of not registering one: the document does not affect the property and is not received as evidence of the transaction.

So the chain of registered deeds is what transfers, and the encumbrance certificate is what tests that chain. A patta sits beside them and answers a narrower question: what does the state's own revenue register currently say about this parcel and who holds it?

Chitta, adangal and the A-Register — the records patta travels with

Three other names come up in the same conversation, and buyers tend to hear them as alternatives to patta. They are not; they are different views of the same land.

• Chitta is the village-level account of the holding. In current practice patta and chitta are issued together from the digitised record — the Government of Tamil Nadu publishes View Patta / Chitta / FMB as a single service on its e-Services of Land Records portal, rather than as two.
• The A-Register is the settlement register for a revenue village. Its extract records what was settled against a survey number: extent, classification and the particulars carried forward from the survey and settlement operation. It is the record that most often explains why a patta today reads differently from an older document.
• The adangal is the village account of occupancy and cultivation, maintained through the village and taluk revenue establishment. It is worth naming an inconvenient fact here: when the state's e-Services of Land Records portal was read for the guide on this site, the services listed were View Patta / Chitta / FMB, View A-Register Extract, TSLR Extract, FMB Sketch, TSLR Sketch, View Patta Order Copy and Verify Patta / Chitta. The adangal was not among them. Ask the Village Administrative Officer and the Tahsildar's office, or have your advocate obtain it as part of the title search.

Any third-party page that gives you a confident download route for an adangal is describing something the government's own portal does not currently list. That is the kind of instruction worth checking before you rely on it.

Which office issues it, and which officer maintains it

The officer named in the 1983 Act is the Tahsildar having jurisdiction over the area in which the land is situated — or another Revenue Department officer not below the rank of Deputy Tahsildar authorised by the Government. That is the office where a patta is applied for, where a transfer is applied for, and where a dispute about an entry is raised.

The Tahsildar's jurisdiction is the taluk, and the taluk contains revenue villages. This matters practically because a village name alone is not an address. Krishnagiri district publishes 661 revenue villages across eight taluks; two villages with similar names in different taluks are two different places with two different sets of records. Get the survey number, the revenue village and the taluk in writing before anything else.

Patta for a plot in an approved layout: how subdivision works

A plot in a layout does not appear out of nowhere. It is carved out of a parent survey number, and the survey record is subdivided so that the carved-out piece has an identity of its own — written as a survey number with a subdivision, in the form of a fraction.

What a plot buyer wants, therefore, is not the patta for the parent land but the patta for the subdivision being sold. A seller who produces the parent patta and points at a plot number on a layout drawing has produced two documents that do not yet meet. The FMB sketch is what ties them together, because it is the government's own measurement drawing of the parcel and its position among the survey numbers around it.

Where the subdivision has not yet been effected, that is not automatically a problem — it is a question with a documented answer, and the answer belongs in writing before money moves.

Patta transfer after a purchase, and the order things happen in

This is the step buyers arriving from Karnataka miss more often than any other, because it is the analogue of khata transfer and it does not carry the same name.

1. The sale deed is executed and presented for registration at the sub-registrar's office with jurisdiction over the parcel.
2. Registration is completed. That is the act that transfers.
3. A separate application for transfer of patta is filed before the Tahsildar, with the registered deed.
4. An order follows, and the record is updated. Keep the order.

Between steps two and three, the revenue record still shows the seller. Every later event that reads the revenue record — the next sale, a loan, an encumbrance search — starts from whatever is standing there. The gap is administrative, and it is entirely on the buyer to close it.

Reading a patta: the fields that matter

Four fields carry most of the weight, and each of them is a thing you can check against another document rather than accept.

• The name. It should match the seller on the deed. Any difference should be explained by a document, not by an assurance.
• The survey number and subdivision. It should be the subdivision you are buying, spelled the way the record spells it.
• The extent. Tamil Nadu keeps it in hectares and ares, not in cents or grounds. Convert it yourself and compare it with what you have been told you are buying.
• The classification. This is the entry that decides what may lawfully be done with the land, and it is the entry a brochure word cannot override.

The extent conversion is arithmetic rather than opinion, and the units it is quoted in on this corridor are set out in our note on cent, ground and kuzhi.

Where buyers go wrong by assuming khata behaviour

Three assumptions travel across the state line and none of them survives.

The first is that the record updates itself on registration. It does not; the mutation is a separate proceeding. The second is that a printout from the seller is the record. It is not — the state portal carries a Verify Patta / Chitta service precisely so that a buyer can pull the document themselves rather than read someone else's copy. The third is that the record settles title. It settles no more of it in Tamil Nadu than a khata does in Karnataka, which is to say very little.

What to ask a seller to produce alongside it

Patta on its own answers one question. These are the documents that answer the rest, and asking for them is a document request rather than a confrontation.

• The A-Register extract for the survey number, to check the patta extent and classification against the settlement record.
• The FMB sketch for the subdivision, read with a surveyor rather than by eye.
• The encumbrance certificate for the plot and for the parent survey number, over a period long enough to cover the whole title chain.
• The registered sale deed and the parent documents behind it.
• The approved layout drawing, with the approval reference and the granting authority visible on it.

The full sequence, with the office and the statute named at each step, is set out in our guide to registering a plot in Krishnagiri district. The vocabulary itself — patta alongside the Karnataka terms it is repeatedly confused with — sits in the property glossary, and what SUYUG builds on the Tamil Nadu side of this corridor, with its jurisdiction and regulator stated, is on the Bagalur, Krishnagiri page.