A Khata, B Khata and e Khata explained. Why Khata is not title, why only a final e Khata registers, and what B to A conversion costs before Aug 2026.
A Khata is not proof of ownership. It is the municipal record of who is liable to pay property tax on a property and whether that property is recognised as compliant for civic purposes, and the Karnataka High Court has consistently held that it confers no title. What changed in October 2024 is that this non-title document became the gate through which title must now pass: since the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike rolled out its faceless e-Khata system on 1 October 2024, a valid final e-Khata is mandatory for registering a property transaction in Bengaluru. So the Khata will not prove your seller owns the property, and it will still stop your ₹8 crore purchase at the sub-registrar's desk. A luxury buyer has to hold both facts at once.
Khata does not confer title. In Jayamma v Assistant Revenue Officer, the Karnataka High Court held that while a Khata does not confer title, it is vital for utility connections, mortgages by deposit of title deeds, conveyances and construction permissions.
A-Khata means the property sits in the main property register and is compliant. B-Khata was the separate register for properties taxed by the civic body but not fully compliant with plan approvals, land conversion or bylaws.
e-Khata is not a third category. It is the digital form of the Khata, and it exists in two states. Only the final e-Khata enables registration. A draft e-Khata is a preview, not a document.
The scale of the draft-to-final gap during the rollout was stark. By 9 November 2024, more than 10 lakh draft e-Khatas had been downloaded but only about 48,000 final e-Khatas had been issued (The Hindu).
The B-Khata to A-Khata conversion fee is 2% of guidance value until 23 August 2026, cut from 5% under the Karnataka government's Bhu Guarantee scheme. Bengaluru has roughly 7 lakh B-Khata properties against 16 lakh A-Khata properties.
The reason the whole system was digitised: Revenue Minister Krishna Byre Gowda said in September 2024 that fake khata certificates presented at registration were costing the government roughly ₹500 crore a year in Bengaluru alone.
Start here, because almost every expensive mistake in this area begins with the opposite assumption.
A Khata is a municipal revenue record identifying the person liable to pay property tax on a specific property, along with the property's dimensions, location and tax assessment. It is an account, which is what the word means. It records who the civic body will send the bill to. It does not adjudicate who owns the land.
The Karnataka High Court in Jayamma v Assistant Revenue Officer held that although a Khata does not confer title, it is vital for purposes such as utility connections, mortgages by deposit of title deeds, conveyances and construction permissions. That formulation is worth reading twice. The court is saying the document is legally weightless on ownership and practically indispensable on everything else.
Title, by contrast, comes from the chain of registered conveyance deeds, tested against the encumbrance certificate, the mother deed, the land conversion order and the approved layout plan. A seller with a clean A-Khata and a broken title chain has a problem you cannot see in the Khata. A seller with clean title and no e-Khata has a problem you cannot register around.
The Khata received statutory recognition under the Greater Bengaluru Governance Act, 2024, which is a meaningful upgrade in status but not a change in its legal character. Our note on the BBMP to GBA transition covers what the new authority means for property owners more broadly.
A-Khata means the property is entered in the main property register maintained by the civic body, and that the civic body treats it as compliant with statutory requirements including land conversion, approved layout plan and building bylaws.
The practical consequences of an A-Khata are cumulative rather than singular:
The property is freely registrable and transferable. The sub-registrar will accept the transaction, subject to the other documents being in order.
Banks lend against it. A-Khata properties are accepted collateral for home loans across mainstream lenders. This matters even to buyers paying cash, because it determines the size of the buyer pool when you eventually sell.
Plan sanctions and building licences are available. You can build, extend or reconstruct. On a villa plot or a bungalow site, this is the whole point of the purchase.
Utility connections in your own name are straightforward. Water, electricity and sewerage follow the Khata.
For any purchase above ₹3 crore, A-Khata should be treated as a precondition rather than a preference. The exception is genuinely trophy stock in old-money pockets where title is impeccable but municipal records lag, and even there the correct move is to fix the record before completion, not after.
B-Khata refers to entry in a separate register historically maintained by the civic body for properties on which it collected tax but which it did not certify as fully compliant. It was a revenue-collection device, not a legality certificate, and it was widely misread as the latter.
The commercial consequences are severe and they compound:
No plan sanction. You cannot get a building licence on a B-Khata site, which makes a plot purchase close to worthless for a buyer intending to build.
Restricted lending. Mainstream banks generally decline B-Khata as collateral, which shrinks your resale market to cash buyers and pushes the price down accordingly.
A discount that does not reverse on its own. Properties without clean municipal records attract lower bids and reduced recovery value, a point made explicitly in legal analysis of e-Khata's effect on lending security.
Transaction friction at every future step. Every subsequent sale, mortgage or succession runs into the same wall.
Bengaluru has approximately 7 lakh B-Khata properties against roughly 16 lakh A-Khata properties, on the civic body's own numbers. That is not a fringe problem. It is close to a third of the city's property register.
I want to be direct about something here, because the market is not. A B-Khata property is not automatically an illegal property, and the two get conflated constantly by agents on both sides of a deal. It may simply be a site in a layout that was never regularised, or a building with a deviation from the sanctioned plan. But at ₹5 crore and above, the distinction stops mattering commercially, because the exit is impaired either way.
This is the most misunderstood point in Bangalore property documentation right now, and it is where I see transactions stall.
e-Khata is the digital form of the Khata record, not a separate category of Khata. A property has an e-Khata that is either A or B in character. The digitisation did not create a new class of property; it moved the existing register online and attached a verifiable identity to each record.
The part that catches people is the two-stage process. When BBMP launched the system on 1 October 2024, property owners could log in to the e-Aasthi portal and download a draft e-Khata generated from digitised records. Converting that draft into a final e-Khata requires uploading supporting documents and receiving digital approval. Only the final e-Khata enables registration.
The gap between the two was enormous during the rollout. The Hindu reported on 9 November 2024 that more than 10 lakh draft e-Khatas had been downloaded, with about 5 lakh drafts downloaded in the first 24 days alone, while only around 48,000 final e-Khatas had been issued. At one point in that early window, not a single draft had been approved to final status. Those specific figures are now historic and the volumes have grown substantially, but the structural distinction has not changed, and it is still the single most common reason a Bangalore deal misses its registration date.
If a seller sends you a PDF headed e-Khata, your first question is whether it is draft or final. Your second is whether the QR code resolves against the e-Aasthi record. Do not accept a screenshot.
| A-Khata | B-Khata | e-Khata | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Entry in the main property register | Entry in the separate B register | The digital form of either, held on the e-Aasthi portal |
| Confers title | No | No | No |
| Signals compliance | Yes | No | Depends on whether the underlying record is A or B |
| Property registration | Permitted | Historically restricted | Final e-Khata is mandatory since 1 October 2024 |
| Bank lending | Generally accepted | Generally declined | Lenders verify the e-Khata directly |
| Building plan sanction | Available | Not available | Follows the underlying A or B status |
| Two states | Not applicable | Not applicable | Draft and final. Only final enables registration |
There is a live, dated opportunity here and it is closing.
Under the Karnataka government's Bhu Guarantee scheme, announced by Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar on 13 May 2026, the Greater Bengaluru Authority reduced the fee for converting a B-Khata property to A-Khata from 5% of guidance value to 2%. The concession runs for a 100-day window from 15 May 2026 to 23 August 2026, after which the fee reverts. Roughly 7 lakh property owners are eligible.
Note precisely what the fee is calculated on. It is a percentage of guidance value, which is the government-notified minimum registrable value, not the market price you would pay. On a site with a ₹5 crore guidance value, the difference between 2% and 5% is ₹10 lakh against ₹25 lakh, a ₹15 lakh saving. Our note on why guidance value governs your registration explains how that figure is set.
Alongside the fee cut, the GBA has been running "My e-Khata, My Hakku" open house camps every Saturday across roughly 50 to 52 locations, handling new e-Khata issuance, B-Khata to A-Khata conversion, corrections to records, mutation requests and long-pending applications.
The transaction planning point is straightforward. If you are buying a B-Khata property, the conversion cost is a live negotiation item, and whether it falls before or after 23 August 2026 changes that number materially. If you are the seller of a B-Khata property, converting before the deadline is very likely the highest-return fortnight of work available to you. Do not assume the deadline will be extended. Plan on the stated date and treat any extension as upside.
Run these in order. Each one takes minutes and each one has stopped a deal I have worked on.
Confirm A or B status from the record itself, not from the seller's description. Ask for the e-Khata document and read the register classification on it. "It's A-Khata" said in a WhatsApp message is not a check.
Confirm the e-Khata is final, not draft. Verify the QR code resolves against the e-Aasthi record. A draft cannot be registered against, and discovering this on the day of registration is the most common avoidable failure.
Match the Khata name to the sale deed chain. The person on the Khata must be the person selling, or the discrepancy must be explained by a documented succession, a will, or a pending mutation. A mismatch here is a red flag on title, not on paperwork.
Match the property dimensions on the Khata to the sale deed and to the physical site. Khata extract dimensions that differ from the deed indicate either an old error or an unapproved alteration.
Pull a fresh encumbrance certificate covering at least 30 years. The EC was removed from the mandatory upload list for e-Khata applications, but it remains mandatory for registration itself, and it is the document that reveals mortgages, liens and litigation the Khata will never show.
Confirm property tax is paid to date, with receipts. Arrears attach to the property and become yours. On a large property they run to material sums.
For the broader process this sits inside, see our walkthrough of how to buy luxury real estate in Bangalore from shortlist to registration and the 12-point checklist for a luxury apartment purchase.
Three situations account for most of the Khata problems I see at the top of the market.
Resale of older bungalows and independent houses. Stock built before the modern approval regime frequently carries a B-Khata or a Khata in the name of a deceased ancestor with mutation never completed. The title may be perfectly sound and the record still unusable. Our note on Bangalore's luxury resale market covers who is transacting in this segment.
Completed pre-RERA projects. Where there is no live RERA registration to verify against, diligence rests entirely on the title chain and the municipal record, which raises the weight of the Khata check considerably. We made this point in the Devanahalli ultra-luxury villa comparison, and it applies to every completed estate of that vintage.
NRI purchases conducted remotely. A buyer relying on a power of attorney and a set of scanned documents is exactly the buyer a forged khata was designed to catch. Recall the Revenue Minister's September 2024 statement: fake khata certificates were being produced on computers and submitted at registration, costing an estimated ₹500 crore a year in Bengaluru alone. Verification against the e-Aasthi record, not against a PDF, is the entire defence. Our NRI guide to buying luxury property in Bangalore sets out the wider remote-purchase risks.
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