Checking if Maharashtra land is under litigationजमीन वाद

There is no single register of land disputes in Maharashtra. A case is filed wherever the law sends it, and what is being fought over decides the forum. An objection to a mutation entry is decided by the revenue officer who certifies it, often the तहसीलदार (tahsildar). A tenancy claim or a partition of ancestral holdings is a revenue court matter. A suit about who owns the land, or about an agreement to sell that was never performed, is a civil case in the district or taluka court. A bank recovering a loan against mortgaged land goes to a tribunal. If the seller is a company in insolvency, the matter sits in another forum again.

Each of those forums keeps its own list, on its own website, searched by its own key. The revenue courts can be searched by survey number, because the land is the subject of the case. Almost everywhere else the search runs on a party name or a case number, so it is only as good as the spellings you feed it. A buyer who checked one portal and found nothing has covered one forum out of several.

The forums a buyer is most likely to need are below, with the search key each one uses. Working through all of them is the only way to cover the ground.

The same land can appear in two of these at once. A mutation objection before the tahsildar and a civil suit between brothers over the same field are separate proceedings with separate numbers, and neither portal knows about the other.

Before any portal, read the land’s own record. The इतर हक्क (itar hakka, other rights) column of the सातबारा (satbara), the document everyone calls the 7/12, carries what is recorded against the land beyond plain occupancy. A court attachment is recorded there. So is an order restraining a transfer, a remark that a suit is pending, and a bank charge in the form of a recorded loan entry. The wording is terse and in revenue Marathi, and it usually cites a फेरफार (ferfar, mutation) number, sometimes a case number and the name of the court. Every one of those numbers is a thread to pull.

An objection to a mutation does not vanish. The entry goes into the register of disputed entries and waits for the revenue officer to decide it, so the mutation history shows the objection and, where it was decided, the order that closed it. Read the ferfar entries in sequence rather than only the latest one, because a cancelled entry is itself the record of a fight.

Section 52 of the Transfer of Property Act, 1882 is why these remarks carry weight. It states the doctrine of lis pendens: while a suit about the land is pending, a transfer of that land is subject to what the court finally decides. The buyer takes the land with the case still attached. A remark on the record warns that the doctrine may apply, and an extract with no such remark is not evidence that no suit exists.

The steps below run from the land to the people who hold it. They assume a current extract is in front of you and that you can read what the 7/12 records, because every later search uses the names and numbers it gives you.

1. Pull the current digitally signed 7/12 for the survey or gat number and read every itar hakka entry to its end, noting every ferfar number, case number and court named.
2. Search the survey or gat number on eqjcourts.gov.in for that taluka and district, which lists revenue court matters against the land rather than a person.
3. Search every recorded holder name as a party on services.ecourts.gov.in for the district and taluka courts, and repeat it for each spelling variant.
4. Search the same names on bombayhighcourt.gov.in, including the bench that covers the district.
5. If the itar hakka column shows a bank or society charge, search drt.gov.in for recovery proceedings against the holder.
6. If the seller is a company, or a firm with a company as a partner, search nclt.gov.in under the company name.
7. Save a dated screenshot or PDF of every result page, including the empty ones, and keep them with the file.

A pending case is an unknown outcome. By itself it does not prove the title is bad, and an empty search result does not prove the land is free of dispute. What a buyer needs next is paper: the plaint or application, the interim orders, and the stage the matter has reached.

A decided case still has to be read. The order says who won, on which question, and what it directs, none of which is visible from a case status line. An order can also be under appeal, in which case the matter continues in another forum under another number that the first search never showed. Ask for the certified copy of the order and for the appeal position together.

Name searches fail quietly. The same holder is typed as Shantaram on one portal and Shantram on another, and a father’s name forms part of the party name in some filings and is absent in others. Search every recorded holder in the variants you can think of, in Devanagari and in English where the portal takes both, and do not read a single blank page as an answer about the land. The holder names settled by a title check are the spellings to start from.

An online search is a screen with known holes. Older matters were never digitised, and some forums publish only part of what they hold. Party names are transliterated by whoever typed them, so one person turns up under several spellings across portals. A survey number can be written as a plain number, with a hissa suffix, or as a gat number, and a search on one form misses the others. Village names repeat across talukas, so every hit has to be checked against the district and taluka. A case can also be filed the day after you searched.

So record the date of every search, keep the pages you saw, and take them to a licensed advocate along with the record. Where something does turn up, the next step is a certified copy of the pleadings and orders from that court, which no portal search replaces.