Registering a plot in Krishnagiri district

A project name is a marketing label. It appears on no revenue record, it cannot be searched on any government portal, and two projects a road apart can carry names that differ by a word. What the state's records answer to is the survey number — often a survey number with a subdivision, written as a fraction — together with the revenue village it falls in and the taluk that village belongs to.

Krishnagiri district publishes 661 revenue villages across eight taluks. A village name on its own is therefore not an address in this district, and a village name plus a district is not one either. Ask for the full string as it appears on the seller's own documents, and use that string for every search that follows.

Patta records the holding for a survey number in the name of the person the revenue department shows as holding it, with the extent recorded against it. Chitta is the village-level account of the same holding. In current practice the two are issued together from the digitised record, and the Government of Tamil Nadu publishes View Patta / Chitta / FMB as a single service.

The patta pass book regime rests on the Tamil Nadu Patta Pass Book Act, 1983 and the rules made under it, and the Tahsildar with jurisdiction over the land is the officer named in that Act. Mutation after a sale — getting the patta into the buyer's name — is a revenue proceeding before that officer, and it is a separate act from registering the deed.

What patta does not do is create title. It is a revenue record of a holding, generated from what the department already holds, so it inherits whatever is in that record, right or wrong. It is evidence to be read alongside the registered title documents and the encumbrance certificate — never instead of them.

The A-Register is the settlement register for a revenue village. Its extract is the record of what was settled against a survey number — the extent, the classification and the particulars carried forward from the survey and settlement operation. It is the document that routinely explains a discrepancy between what a patta says today and what the land was recorded as historically.

The FMB — field measurement book — sketch is the survey drawing of the parcel: its shape, its dimensions and its position relative to the survey numbers around it. A plot in a layout will sit inside a parent survey number, and the FMB sketch is how a surveyor ties the layout's plot boundaries back to the government's own measurement of the land underneath it.

Both are published as separate services on the state's e-Services of Land Records portal, alongside the TSLR extract and sketch for town-surveyed land. A buyer who has looked only at a patta has looked at the holding and not at the parcel.

The adangal is the village account of what is on the land — occupancy and cultivation particulars entered against survey numbers, maintained through the village and taluk revenue establishment. For agricultural land it is the record that shows how the land has actually been used and by whom, which is why it is asked for in a land purchase.

Here is what this page will not do. Numerous private sites publish confident step-by-step instructions for downloading an adangal from a state portal. When the Government of Tamil Nadu's e-Services of Land Records portal was read for this guide, the services it named 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.

So the honest instruction is the offline one: ask the Village Administrative Officer and the Tahsildar's office with jurisdiction over the land, and ask your own advocate to obtain it as part of the title search. If the state brings it online, the state's portal is where that will be announced.

The certificate is a statement of what is on the register for the property over the period you ask for. It is the document that surfaces a mortgage, an attachment, a prior sale or a partition that the seller's own paperwork does not mention, and it is only as good as the period and the property description you searched on.

Two practical points that are easy to get wrong on a plot purchase. Search the parent survey number as well as the plot, because an encumbrance created against the parent land before subdivision does not stop existing when a layout is drawn over it. And search a period long enough to cover the whole chain your advocate is examining, rather than the shortest period the counter will issue.

The Registration Department publishes encumbrance certificate search on its own portal, together with a guideline value search, a jurisdiction finder and a sub-registrar office locator.

Section 49 requires a person intending to carry out development on land or a building to apply in writing to the appropriate planning authority for permission, and requires the authority to record its reasons in writing where it refuses. That phrase — the appropriate planning authority — is doing real work: which body it is depends on whether the land falls inside a notified planning area, and that is a parcel-level question.

The Directorate of Town and Country Planning states that its jurisdiction covers the entire Tamil Nadu except the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority area. Within Krishnagiri district the district administration publishes a District Town Planning Office at Krishnagiri, the Hosur New Town Development Authority for the Hosur new town development area, and a local planning authority for Krishnagiri town.

What a buyer wants is not the name of an authority in the abstract but the approval itself: the approved layout drawing, with its approval reference, showing the plot number you are buying, the road widths, the open space reservation and the areas handed over. Read the granting authority off that document. It is the only place the answer is not a guess.

The 2016 Act is central legislation and the registration is state-wise, under the state's own rules — in Tamil Nadu, the Tamil Nadu Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Rules, 2017, approved in G.O.Ms.No.112, Housing and Urban Development Department, dated 22.06.2017. The register is published by the authority at rera.tn.gov.in.

Check the number on the register rather than on the brochure. A registration number is a string that can be typed onto anything; the register is the only place it either resolves or does not. If it does not resolve on the Tamil Nadu register, check that you are on the right state's portal before drawing any conclusion — a Karnataka number will never appear on the Tamil Nadu register, and this corridor produces that confusion constantly.

Section 3(1) also tells you what the absence of a registration means. A project that is not registered may be named. It may not carry a price, an area, a date or an enquiry form, and nobody may invite you to purchase in it in any manner. A promoter who takes a booking amount for an unregistered project is not being early; they are doing the thing the section prohibits.

Guideline value is the value the Registration Department records for a property for the purpose of the duty payable on an instrument. It is published by the department and revised by it, and it is searchable on the department's own portal. Stamp duty and registration charges are likewise fixed by schedules that are amended by notification.

This site publishes no figure of that kind, for one reason: a rate printed on a web page is correct until the notification that changes it, and a wrong rate repeated by an answer engine with a developer's name attached is worse than no rate at all. What we will do instead is name the body that publishes the current figure, every time, and link to it.

For land in Tamil Nadu the body is the Registration Department, Government of Tamil Nadu, under the Inspector General of Registration, at tnreginet.gov.in. For land in Karnataka it is the Karnataka Department of Stamps and Registration, at kaverionline.karnataka.gov.in. Where a purchase raises a tax question rather than a registration one, the bodies are the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs for GST and the Income Tax Department for income tax; both publish their own current position.

Those two sections between them answer the question buyers ask in the wrong order. The first is whether the document must be registered — for an instrument creating or transferring an interest in immovable property, it must. The second is where, and the answer is a fact about the land, not about the parties: the office whose sub-district the property sits in.

That is why this site does not publish a named office for a given village on this corridor. Sub-district jurisdictions are administrative, they are redrawn, and offices are created. The Registration Department runs a jurisdiction finder and a sub-registrar office locator on its own portal, which answers it for the village you name on the day you ask. Use that, and confirm it with the office before you travel.

Registration is the act that transfers, and it is worth separating it in your mind from everything that follows it. The revenue record does not update itself when a deed is registered.

This is the step buyers arriving from Karnataka skip more than any other in the list, because it is the analogue of khata transfer and it does not carry the same name. Until the mutation is done, the revenue record still shows the seller as holding the land, and the next transaction, the next loan and the next encumbrance search all start from that record.

The Act names 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 — as the officer who exercises the powers under it. The application follows the registered deed, and the charge for it is set administratively, so no figure for it appears here.

Do this immediately after registration, with the registered deed in hand, and keep the order that results.