Converted or agricultural land in Karnataka? What the 2025 rules changed, why the DC no longer decides inside master plan areas, and what to buy.
The term everyone in Bangalore uses for this is "DC conversion," short for the Deputy Commissioner's order converting agricultural land to non-agricultural use. For a large share of land inside Bengaluru's master plan area, the Deputy Commissioner is no longer the person who issues it. That changed in September 2025, and most published guidance, including what the search engines are currently summarising, still describes the older process. If you are buying land here, the practical question is not how conversion works. It is whether to buy land that is already converted or to buy agricultural land and convert it yourself. Those are different purchases with different risk profiles, and after 35 years of these transactions our answer is the same in almost every case.
We tell clients to buy converted land. Not because agricultural land is a bad asset, but because the buyer almost never has the bandwidth the approval process demands.
The Karnataka Land Revenue (Amendment) Rules, 2025 were notified on 17 September 2025 and took effect that month. They rewrote how conversion is granted.
Inside approved master plan zones, where the intended use conforms to the zonal classification, the Deputy Commissioner's prior permission is no longer required. The planning authority verifies, collects fees and issues a digitally signed conversion certificate.
Outside master plan zones, the DC still scrutinises the application and must decide within 15 days, with deemed approval if no action is taken within 30 days.
Every application now needs a notarised affidavit in Forms 21B and 21C, alongside RTC extracts, mutation register extracts, pre-conversion sketches, khata certificates where the land sits under a local body, and the relevant master plan extract.
Misuse is now recorded against the land, not just the owner. Penalties include cancellation, forfeiture of fees, confiscation, and fines up to ₹1 lakh plus ₹2,500 per day, entered as an encumbrance on the RTC under Rule 106F.
That last point is the buyer's problem. An encumbrance from someone else's botched conversion travels with the parcel.
Land conversion is the statutory permission to use agricultural land for a non-agricultural purpose, granted under Section 95 of the Karnataka Land Revenue Act, 1964. Without it, agricultural land cannot lawfully be built on, no matter who owns it or what they paid.
The everyday name for the resulting document is a DC conversion order. That name is now partly historic, and the gap between the vocabulary and the law is where buyers get into trouble. A seller can hand you a document, call it a DC conversion, and be describing something issued under a process that no longer exists in that form for that parcel.
Conversion is also upstream of almost every other record you will check. An A-Khata, for instance, signals among other things that the civic body treats the property as compliant with land conversion requirements. If the conversion is defective, the khata sitting on top of it is resting on nothing. Our note on A-Khata, B-Khata and e-Khata explains why the khata proves tax liability rather than title, and why that distinction matters at registration.
The Karnataka Land Revenue (Amendment) Rules, 2025, notified on 17 September 2025 under Notification No. RD-LGP/6/2025 and published in the Karnataka Gazette Part IVA, split the conversion process into two tracks based on whether the land sits inside an approved master plan zone.
The split works like this.
Inside an approved master plan zone, conforming to the zonal classification. No wait for the Deputy Commissioner's prior permission. The planning authority verifies the details, collects the fees and issues a digitally signed conversion certificate. This is the fast track, and for land inside Bengaluru's planning area it covers a great deal of what actually transacts.
Outside those zones. The DC applies rigorous scrutiny and must verify and decide within 15 days. If the DC does not act within 30 days, the application is deemed approved.
Small industries on up to two acres. Automatic conversion without DC approval. This flows from the Karnataka Land Reforms and Certain Other Law (Amendment) Act, 2025, passed in August 2025, which added a proviso to Section 95 exempting agricultural land up to two acres from the conversion requirement for establishing new industries.
Renewable energy projects. Also granted automatic conversion without DC approval, subject to Energy Department clearance. An automated system for these was rolled out in January 2026.
The DC's discretion has not vanished where it still applies. In Staney Herald D'Souza v State of Karnataka, decided on 19 December 2024, the Karnataka High Court upheld the Deputy Commissioner's discretionary power to refuse conversion applications that contravene existing laws. Deemed approval after 30 days is a timing protection, not a licence to convert land that should not be converted.
For buyers in the airport belt, this two-track structure is the whole ball game, because whether a Devanahalli or Nandi Hills parcel falls inside or outside a planning authority's master plan changes the timeline from weeks to an open-ended wait. Our Hebbal versus Devanahalli comparison and the north Bangalore micro-market page cover how those corridors differ on more than price.
Every conversion application now requires a notarised affidavit in the prescribed Forms 21B and 21C. This was the headline procedural change, and its purpose is to make incomplete or fraudulent applications harder to file.
The full document set accompanying the affidavit:
| Document | What it establishes |
|---|---|
| Notarised affidavit (Forms 21B, 21C) | Declaration in the prescribed format |
| RTC extract | Record of rights, tenancy and crops |
| Mutation register extract | The chain of recorded transfers |
| Pre-conversion sketch | Boundaries and extent before conversion |
| Khata certificate | Required only where the land falls under a local body |
| Master plan extract | Whether the parcel sits inside a planning zone, and its zonal classification |
Applications run through the state's Bhoomi land conversion portal. The Amendment also brought wider digitisation: online filing, digital signatures on certificates, and electronic RTC extracts carrying QR codes for verification. That QR code is the single most useful thing in the reform for a buyer, because it converts a document you have to trust into a record you can check.
Every time a client wants to buy a large piece of land, we tell them to buy converted land.
The reason is not legal. It is a realistic assessment of what the buyer will actually do. A businessman buying a large parcel has the money. He does not have the time, the effort or the bandwidth to go through the approval process. Going and converting that land will take the life out of him. He will end up appointing someone to handle the licensing, and then he is managing a liaison process he has no way to supervise, on a timeline he does not control, for an outcome he cannot guarantee.
I will be direct about our own position in this, because it is relevant. Our job is to get you the property. It is not to do licensing work. We are brokers and advisers, and a firm that tells you it will handle your conversion is quietly telling you it has a second business. When we say buy converted, part of what we are saying is that we would rather find you a clean parcel than sell you a project.
The commercial argument sits underneath the practical one. Converted land is priced higher because the risk has already been retired. What you are paying for in that premium is a defined asset instead of an application. Buy the outcome, not the process.
That principle runs through most of what we advise. The same logic sits behind our 12-point checklist for a luxury purchase and our walkthrough of the full buying process from shortlist to registration.
There is a real exception, and it is defined by bandwidth rather than by budget.
Some buyers come with the capacity. They have run approval processes before, they have people who do this properly, and they are not going to lose interest in month seven. For those buyers we say the opposite: buy agricultural land, because of the various benefits that come with it. The entry price is lower, the negotiating position is stronger because the pool of buyers willing to take on the process is thinner, and the value created by conversion accrues to you rather than to the last owner.
Three things determine whether you are that buyer.
Whether the parcel sits inside or outside a master plan zone. Inside, with conforming zonal classification, the process is now materially shorter. Outside, you are in DC territory with a 15-day decision requirement and a 30-day deemed approval backstop, which is better than the old position but still an open process.
Whether you are eligible to hold agricultural land at all. Karnataka's restrictions on who may purchase farmland, historically found in Sections 79A and 79B of the Land Reforms Act, have been relaxed since 2020, but this is contested territory that has moved more than once. Confirm the current position with counsel before you commit, rather than relying on what was true when you last looked.
Whether the intended use conforms to the zoning. Conversion is granted for a specified purpose, residential or commercial or industrial. Converting for the wrong use is not a paperwork problem you fix later.
| Already converted | Agricultural, to be converted | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | Higher, includes the retired risk | Lower |
| Time to build | Immediate, subject to plan sanction | Weeks to open-ended, depending on master plan status |
| Who carries approval risk | The previous owner, already discharged | You |
| Buyer eligibility questions | None arising from land classification | Must confirm eligibility to hold farmland |
| Bank lending | Straightforward | Constrained until conversion completes |
| Resale pool | Wide | Narrow until converted |
| Suits | Almost every buyer | Buyers with genuine process capacity |
| Main failure mode | Defective or misdescribed conversion order | Conversion that stalls or is refused |
Run these in sequence. Each has stopped a transaction we have worked on.
Get the conversion order itself, not a reference to it. A sale deed that mentions conversion is not evidence of conversion. Ask for the order and the certificate.
Check which authority issued it and under which track. A certificate issued by a planning authority under the post-September 2025 route is valid. So is an older DC order. What matters is that the issuing authority matches the route that applied to that parcel at that date.
Confirm the purpose matches your intended use. Residentially converted land does not support a commercial build.
Verify the extent on the order against the survey sketch and the physical site. Conversion is granted over a defined extent. Partial conversion of a larger holding is common and frequently misrepresented as covering the whole parcel.
Pull a fresh RTC and read it for encumbrances. Under Rule 106F, penalties for conversion misuse are recorded as an encumbrance on the RTC. This is where a prior owner's violation surfaces, and it is now the first place to look.
Check the kharab classification within the survey boundary. "A" kharab, covering rocky or sandy patches, farm buildings and threshing floors, belongs to the landholder only on an explicit government grant or confirmation, and otherwise remains state property. "B" kharab, meaning land reserved for roads, tanks and grazing, is always state-owned regardless of where it sits inside the survey boundary. Buyers routinely pay for extent they cannot own.
Pull an encumbrance certificate covering at least 30 years, and read the guidance value position before you fix a registration date. Our note on why guidance value governs registration and on the August 2025 registration fee revision both bear on the closing cost.
The weekend estate. Nandi Hills, Kanakapura and the land beyond Devanahalli. These deals die on title and conversion far more often than on price, and the buyer is usually someone who fell for the parcel before anyone checked the master plan position.
The villa plot. A gated project on converted land is a different asset from a standalone plot with an unverified order, even when the per-square-foot numbers look comparable. Our Devanahalli ultra-luxury villa comparison and the wider luxury villa market guide set out how that plays into pricing, and the apartment versus villa framework covers the prior decision.
The CBD redevelopment parcel. Old central Bangalore holdings occasionally carry conversion records that predate the current regime entirely, with extents that no longer match the survey. The title may be sound and the record still unusable, which is the same pattern we described in the anatomy of a ₹25 crore Lavelle Road transaction.
The buyer who is not in the city. Remote purchases of land are the hardest category in this market, because the one check that cannot be done from a laptop is walking the boundary.
Considering land in Bangalore?
Land is the one asset class in this market where the diligence matters more than the price. If you are looking at a parcel and want the conversion position checked properly before you commit, speak with Sadhwani. We have been advising on Bangalore land and property since 1991, and you can see the full range of what we do on our services page.
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