News · 5 October 2026 · 3 min read

Buying a plot in Dehradun: the papers to see before you pay anything

A plot is the easiest property to buy badly. There is no building to inspect, no society to ask, no neighbour who has lived through the lift breaking. What you are buying is a line on a map

Here is the set we ask for before we will put a Dehradun plot on this site.

The khasra number, and what it is attached to

Every piece of land in Uttarakhand has a khasra number. Ask for it first, in writing, before anything else — not the project name, not the plot number in the seller's brochure. Those are marketing. The khasra is the land.

Once you have it, the khatauni (the record of rights) tells you whose name the land sits in. Compare that name against the person offering to sell it to you. If they do not match, stop and find out why: a power of attorney, an inheritance that was never recorded, a sale that was agreed and never registered. Each of those has a fix, and each fix takes time you should know about before you pay a token.

Mutation, which is the part people skip

A sale deed records that a sale happened. Mutation — dakhil kharij — records that the revenue department has updated its books to say so. They are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where trouble lives.

Ask to see the mutation for the seller's own purchase. If the land changed hands three years ago and was never mutated, you are buying from somebody whose ownership the state's own records do not yet reflect.

The encumbrance certificate

This is the document that says whether anybody else has a claim on the land — a mortgage, a loan against it, a court attachment. Get one covering a meaningful stretch of years, not a few months. The cost is small and the thing it rules out is not.

Land use, which decides whether you can build

Agricultural land is not residential land. Converting it is a process, it has a cost, and it does not always succeed. If a seller tells you conversion is "a formality", ask to see the order. If it has not been applied for, you are buying farmland at a plot price and carrying the risk yourself.

Separately, check whether the plot falls inside the development authority's approved layout. An approved layout means roads, widths and setbacks that the authority has already agreed to. An unapproved one means you are relying on the seller's drawing.

Who may buy, and how much

Uttarakhand restricts how much land a buyer from outside the state can purchase, and the rules have been amended more than once in recent years. We are not going to print a threshold here, because the number that was right last year may not be the number today, and you would be making a very large decision on a sentence in a blog post.

What to do instead: ask a local advocate to confirm the current position in writing before you pay a token, and ask the sub-registrar's office what they are presently accepting. Both answers are free. A deed that cannot be registered is a deed you cannot enforce.

On the ground

Walk the plot with the seller and a chain survey, and match what you see against the map. Count the boundary stones. Ask who farms the adjoining land and whether anybody has ever disputed the line. Ask about the access road — not whether there is one today, but whose land it crosses and what is recorded about it. A plot with no recorded right of way is a plot you can own and cannot reach.

Look at the slope and where water goes in the monsoon. Dehradun has plenty of land that is perfectly good in April and a channel in July.

What we do

Every plot on this site is visited by one of our agents before it carries the verified badge, and the badge means the papers above were seen on site and matched against the record — not that we have an opinion on the price.

If you are selling a plot and you have this set in order, it will go up quickly. If you are buying and you want a second pair of eyes on a file, call us.