From Dharani to Bhu Bharati: what a Telangana property buyer must re-verify during the land-records migration
Telangana replaced Dharani with the Bhu Bharati portal under the 2024 RoR Act. Here is what a buyer must re-verify on the record, the Part-B trap, and how to check.
PropWatch Editorial8 min read
Telangana has migrated its land records from the Dharani portal to a new system called Bhu Bharati, run under the Telangana Record of Rights in Land Act, 2024. The Act was passed by the Assembly in December 2024 and the new portal was launched on 14 April 2025, rolling out statewide from June 2025. For a buyer, a portal migration is precisely the moment land records get mismatched — survey numbers, extents, holder names and charges carried over from one system to another are exactly the fields that drift in a data transfer. The single most useful thing a Telangana buyer can do right now is re-verify the record on Bhu Bharati and reconcile it against the seller's paper documents before any money moves.
What Dharani was, and why it changed
Dharani, launched in 2020, was an integrated land-records and registration system: it merged the revenue record (Record of Rights) with the registration function, so that recording and registering a transaction happened on one platform. In practice it became known for locked records and a large backlog of grievances — the incoming state government reported inheriting more than six lakh pending grievances tied to the system. Bhu Bharati is the replacement, enacted to address those grievances and to restore officer-level discretion that Dharani had largely removed.
The practical changes a buyer should know are concrete. Grievance redressal is decentralised — a person can now approach the local tahsildar or revenue divisional officer (RDO) and escalate to the District Collector, rather than the limited channels Dharani offered. The Act mandates a survey map at the time of registration, which Dharani did not require. And the new RoR law opened a correction window: applications to rectify wrong entries can be filed within a year of the law's commencement or within a year of the wrong entry — a window that, for the commencement-linked cases, ran into April 2026. The migration does not erase any defect that existed under Dharani; it relabels where the record lives.
How to check a property record on Bhu Bharati
The official portal is bhubharati.telangana.gov.in. The citizen section lets anyone view land details and the Record of Rights by survey number, khata or passbook, without an account. Transactional services — mutation, NALA (agricultural-to-non-agricultural) conversion, RoR correction and registration slot booking — require an account, created with an Aadhaar-linked mobile number. Use only the official .gov.in domain; numerous lookalike sites mirror the data and are not the source.
- Open bhubharati.telangana.gov.in and go to the citizen / land-details section.
- Search by survey number (or khata / passbook number) for the district, mandal and village of the parcel, and view the Record of Rights — recorded holder, extent, classification and any noted charges.
- Reconcile every field against the seller's documents — the recorded holder name, the extent (in acres and guntas), the survey and sub-division number, and the land classification. A mismatch carried over from the Dharani migration is the first thing to resolve.
- Run the prohibited-property check on the portal to confirm the survey number is not in the banned / restricted list (see the next section).
- If the record is wrong or incomplete, file the correction or mutation through the portal and, where needed, with the tahsildar or RDO — do not transact on a record you know to be out of date.
- For a transaction, book the registration slot through the portal and confirm a survey map is generated, as the RoR Act now requires.
The Part-B and prohibited-property traps
Two distinct categories on the Telangana record can stop a transaction, and buyers routinely conflate them. They are not the same thing.
- Part-B lands — under Dharani, parcels with unresolved questions over ownership, mutation or registration were parked in 'Part-B' rather than the clean 'Part-A' register. Reporting puts roughly 18 lakh acres in this category statewide, including some Waqf and Bhoodan land. A parcel in Part-B is a parcel the state itself flags as disputed or unsettled; Bhu Bharati aims to provide a route to resolve these, but until a parcel moves to a clean record, treat Part-B status as a stop sign, not a paperwork detail.
- Prohibited / banned property — separately, land notified under the prohibited-property list (assigned land, government land, endowment, Waqf and similar) cannot be freely registered. Bhu Bharati carries a prohibited-property check; run the survey number through it before agreeing to buy. A property on this list is not curable by negotiation.
The logic mirrors what PropWatch has set out for Karnataka revenue land: the Record of Rights tells you who the revenue department records as holder and how the land is classified; the prohibited-property and Part-B flags tell you whether the state permits a transaction at all; and the registered sale deed and link-document chain establish title. A gap in any one is the thing to resolve before signing.
For Hyderabad urban property, the record is not enough
Bhu Bharati settles the revenue and ownership record. For urban property inside Hyderabad it does not settle two separate risks that have demolished buildings with valid records. First, layout and building-permission status: confirm the layout carries HMDA or DTCP approval and that the GHMC or HMDA building permission exists and was not later cancelled — an LRS (Layout Regularisation Scheme) status check belongs here too. Second, lake Full Tank Level (FTL) and buffer-zone risk: a parcel can have a clean Bhu Bharati record and still sit inside a notified FTL or buffer zone exposed to HYDRAA enforcement.
These are independent checks layered on top of the land record, not alternatives to it. A buyer needs all of them to clear before committing to a Hyderabad property.
- Bhu Bharati Record of Rights — confirm holder, extent and classification, and that the parcel is not in Part-B or on the prohibited-property list.
- Encumbrance and registered link documents — trace the title chain and confirm no undisclosed charge or prior transfer.
- HMDA / DTCP layout approval and GHMC or HMDA building permission — confirm the approval exists, covers the parcel, and was not cancelled; check LRS status for unapproved plots.
- HYDRAA FTL and buffer-zone check — verify the survey number against the HMDA lake maps and, where there is any proximity, get a licensed surveyor to mark the FTL boundary.
- Survey map and physical extent — confirm the parcel on the ground matches the survey map the RoR Act now requires at registration.
SourcePropWatch — RTC (pahani) in Karnataka: how to view and verify a land record online on Bhoomi
SourcePropWatch — Hyderabad real estate legal & TS-RERA report
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