Patta and chitta in Tamil Nadu: what the record proves, and what it does not

A patta is a revenue record issued by the taluk office recording who the government treats as holder of a survey number, with its extent and classification. Chitta was a separate village record of holding and classification; Tamil Nadu merged the two into the patta. A patta is evidence of revenue entries and possession, not proof of title.

What a patta actually is

Tamil Nadu's land administration, like the rest of India's, grew out of revenue collection. The state's historical interest in a field was the assessment it yielded, so the register was built to answer the question of who to collect from. Patta is the document that came out of that: an entry in the taluk's books naming the person the revenue department recognises as holder of a particular survey number and liable for the land revenue on it.

A patta identifies the district, taluk and village, the patta number itself, the survey number and subdivision, the extent of the holding, and the classification of the land, including whether it is wet or dry, nanjai or punjai. It names the holder or holders. Where a holding has been split among heirs, several names and their shares will appear. It is a short document and almost all of its usefulness lies in the detail: whether the survey number on it matches the survey number in the sale deed, whether the extent matches, whether the classification is what the seller says it is, and whether the person offering to sell is one of the names on it.

What it does not do is establish that the holder owns the land. This is the point on which most buyers go wrong. Indian courts have held consistently that revenue and mutation entries are for fiscal purposes and do not by themselves confer or destroy title. A patta in a seller's name is good news, because it shows the state's records recognise their possession. It is not a substitute for tracing how they came to hold the land, and a patta obtained on a mistaken or fraudulent basis is not uncommon.

Chitta, and why it has gone

Chitta was a separate record maintained at the village level setting out who held the land, how much of it, and whether it was wet or dry. In practice it duplicated much of what the patta already recorded, and a buyer had to collect both. Tamil Nadu merged the two, so a single patta is now issued carrying the classification and holding details that chitta used to hold separately. If a seller, a broker or an old checklist asks you for a chitta, the correct response is to produce the current patta: it is the record that replaced it. Old chitta copies still surface in document bundles for transactions that predate the merger, and they are useful history, but you cannot obtain a fresh one.

Adangal, the A-Register and the FMB sketch

Three further records fill in what a patta leaves out, and a serious buyer should look at all three.

The adangal, sometimes called the village account or pahani, is maintained by the village administrative officer and records what is actually being done with the land season by season: the crop grown, whether it lay fallow, how it is being used. For agricultural land it is the closest thing to a record of actual use, and a mismatch between the adangal and what you see on site is worth asking about.

The A-Register extract is held at the taluk office and is the fuller statement of a survey number: its classification, extent, assessment, the patta it belongs to and the history of subdivisions. Where a survey number has been subdivided over the years, the A-Register is the record that shows how the current subdivision came to exist. It is the one to ask for when the extent on the patta and the extent in the deed do not agree.

The field measurement book sketch, usually just called the FMB, is the survey department's drawing of the subdivision with its measured boundaries. The patta tells you the extent; the FMB tells you the shape and where the boundaries sit. If you are buying land or a plot rather than a flat, get the FMB and have a licensed surveyor walk the boundaries against it before you pay anything. Boundary disputes in Tamil Nadu are overwhelmingly about subdivisions that were never properly surveyed on the ground.

Tamil Nadu land records: what each one proves and who issues it

Record	What it shows	Issued by	What it does not prove
Patta	The recorded holder of a survey number and subdivision, the extent and the classification of the land.	Tahsildar, taluk office	Ownership. It is a revenue entry, not a title document.
Chitta (merged)	Historically, the holding and whether the land was wet or dry. Now part of the patta.	Previously the village and taluk offices	Anything, as a current document. It is no longer separately issued.
Adangal	Actual use of the land season by season, including crop and fallow entries.	Village administrative officer	Holding or ownership. It is a use record.
A-Register extract	Full detail of a survey number: classification, extent, assessment and subdivision history.	Taluk office	Title, and it will not resolve a boundary on the ground.
FMB sketch	The surveyed shape and boundaries of the subdivision.	Survey and settlement department	Who holds or owns the land.
Encumbrance certificate	Registered transactions affecting the property for the period you ask for, including sales, mortgages and gifts.	Sub-registrar, registration department	Unregistered claims, oral family arrangements, tenancy or pending litigation.
Registered sale deed	That a transfer was executed and registered between named parties.	Sub-registrar, registration department	That the seller had good title to transfer in the first place.

The village officer and the taluk office

Two offices do the work. The village administrative officer sits closest to the land: they maintain the adangal and the village accounts, and when a patta transfer is applied for, it is the VAO who verifies possession on the ground, checks the documents against the village records and reports. The taluk office, headed by the Tahsildar, holds the A-Register and passes the orders. A patta is issued, amended, subdivided or transferred by order of the Tahsildar on the strength of that report.

This division matters practically. If the question is factual and local, whether the land is being cultivated, whether someone else is in possession, whether a path crosses it, the VAO is the person who knows. If the question is about the record itself, a wrong extent, a stale name, a subdivision that was never entered, it is the taluk office that can change it.

Checking a record online

Tamil Nadu publishes its revenue records through the Revenue Department's e-services portal, and viewing a patta costs nothing. You search by selecting the district, taluk and village and then entering either the patta number or the survey number with its subdivision. The portal returns the record on screen, and it will also issue a certificate carrying a reference number. Separately, the portal has a verification facility: enter the reference number of a certificate somebody has given you and it will confirm whether that certificate was in fact issued and show what it said. Use it. A forged patta printout is easy to produce and trivially easy to catch this way.

Two cautions about the online copy. First, what you see is a view of the current entry, so it tells you nothing about how the entry got to be what it is. A name that changed last month looks identical on screen to one that has been there for thirty years. Second, for any formal purpose, a bank, a court, a sub-registrar, you need the certificate issued through the portal or the taluk office rather than a screen printout, because that is the version whose authenticity can be checked. For encumbrance certificates and for the guideline value of a property, the registration department's own portal is the place to look, not the revenue portal; the two systems are separate.

Transferring the patta after you buy

Registering the sale deed and transferring the patta are two different acts in two different departments, and only the first happens on the day you pay. Registration, at the sub-registrar's office, transfers the interest in the property to you. The patta stays in the seller's name until you apply to have it changed, and in Tamil Nadu nobody does that for you.

The application goes to the Tahsildar, in practice through an eSevai centre or the online service, with the registered sale deed, the existing patta, a current encumbrance certificate, the latest land tax receipt and your identity proof. The VAO then verifies possession and reports, notice goes to parties who may be affected, and if nothing is contested the Tahsildar passes an order and a fresh patta issues in your name. Where you have bought part of a survey number, the subdivision has to be surveyed and entered before a separate patta can exist, which is a slower process than a straight name change and one worth starting early.

Why bother, given that the patta does not prove title? Because the record is read as evidence of who has been holding and paying, and a long gap between your purchase and the patta change is a question you will have to answer later. More immediately, a patta in someone else's name obstructs almost everything you might want to do: raising a loan against the land, applying for planning permission, applying for a service connection, selling. And every year the record stays stale is a year in which the previous holder's heirs, creditors or purported purchasers can act on the strength of a record that still names them.

After a purchase in Tamil Nadu: what to do and where

Step	Where	What you should hold at the end
Register the sale deed and collect the original back	Sub-registrar's office	The registered deed with the endorsement, and the fee challans.
Take a fresh encumbrance certificate covering the date of your purchase	Registration department portal or sub-registrar	An EC showing your own deed as the latest entry.
Apply for patta transfer, or for subdivision and patta where you bought part of a survey number	Tahsildar, through eSevai or online	An acknowledgement with an application number you can track.
Attend the VAO verification and produce documents if asked	Village office or on site	A note of who inspected and when.
Collect the new patta and check every field on it	Taluk office or the e-services portal	A patta in your name with the correct survey number, extent and classification.
Verify the certificate reference number online	Revenue e-services portal	Confirmation that the certificate you hold was genuinely issued.
Start paying land tax or local body property tax in your own name	Taluk office or the local body	Receipts in your name from the year of purchase onwards.
For a flat, get the municipal property tax record and the society or association records changed	Local body and the association	Tax record and association register in your name, and the share of land described in your deed.

Patta and an encumbrance certificate are not alternatives

Buyers often treat these as two ways of checking the same thing, and they are not. A patta is a revenue record of who holds the land. An encumbrance certificate is a list, from the registration department, of transactions registered against the property over a period you specify: sales, mortgages, gifts, settlements, releases. A patta cannot tell you that the land is mortgaged, and an EC cannot tell you who the revenue department recognises as holder. You need both, and you need them read together by somebody who can spot the mismatches between them.

And neither is a title search. An EC only lists registered documents. Unregistered agreements, inheritance claims, oral family partitions, tenancy claims and pending litigation do not appear on it. A clean EC and a matching patta narrow the risk considerably. They do not close it, which is why a lawyer's search of the deeds over the statutory period remains the thing you actually pay for.

Does a flat have a patta?

This is the most common confusion among apartment buyers in Chennai, and the answer takes a moment to explain. Patta attaches to land, identified by a survey number and subdivision. A flat on the eighth floor is not a separately surveyed parcel of land. What you buy when you buy a flat is the unit itself plus an undivided share in the land on which the building stands, and that undivided share is described in your sale deed, not carved out as a separate survey subdivision.

The consequence is that in the ordinary course there is no patta in your sole name for your flat. The patta for the parent land continues to exist, and what a buyer should be checking is that patta: that the land on which the building stands is held by the person who sold it to the developer or by the developer, that the survey numbers match those in your sale deed and in the planning approval, and that the classification and conversion position are in order. Practice around whether and how patta can be recorded for undivided shares has varied, so the sensible course is to ask the taluk office what it will issue for your particular building rather than assume either that you are entitled to a patta of your own or that the question does not matter. What you should certainly insist on is the parent land patta, the FMB, and a sale deed that describes your undivided share in terms that match them.

For an independent house or a plot, the position is different and simpler: the land is your own survey subdivision, and the patta should be transferred into your name. That difference is one of several reasons the two formats behave differently in practice, which our comparison of villas, independent houses and apartments goes into.

Buying in Chennai: what this adds up to

Chennai's growth has moved outward along its corridors, and the further out you buy, the more the revenue record matters. On land that was agricultural within living memory, the questions are all record questions: is the classification right, has conversion been done, does the extent in the patta match the extent in the deed, has the subdivision been surveyed, does the layout have planning approval. Urbanrise, the residential brand of Alliance Group, describes its Chennai growth areas as Thirumazhisai, Mahindra World City, Tambaram, Sholinganallur, Padur and Siruseri, and it has projects including World of Joy and Revolution One at Siruseri on the Old Mahabalipuram Road and Spring Tide at Mahindra World City, alongside delivered projects such as Alliance Orchid Palms and Alliance Arena. Across all of those corridors the discipline is the same whoever is building: ask for the parent land records, not only the brochure.

A buyer purchasing from a reputable developer in an approved project is doing much less revenue-record work than someone buying raw land, because the developer has already had to establish the land position to obtain approvals and registration. That is a real advantage and it is one of the things worth testing in our builder evaluation checklist and in PropIQ's independent review of Urbanrise. But it does not remove the need to read the documents. Ask for the parent land patta and FMB, the planning approval, the RERA registration, and a current encumbrance certificate on the project land, and have a lawyer read them together. If you are buying from overseas, the sequencing of these checks and the power of attorney you will need to complete them is covered in our guide for NRI buyers in the UAE.