How to get your village map and Khasra sheets in Uttarakhand

A hill holding in Uttarakhand is rarely one piece of land. Terracing splits it into many small Khasra numbers down a slope, and a Khatauni that runs to a dozen entries is unremarkable. Each of those numbers is drawn on a map sheet, and the sheets are issued a few at a time, so seeing the holding whole means collecting several and putting them back together.

What you are actually asking for

Bhu-Naksha

The cadastral map of a revenue village, showing each Khasra number with its boundaries. Served a sheet at a time, so a terraced holding spans several.

Khatauni

The record of rights: the recorded holder, the Khasra numbers under the holding, the area of each and the class of land. It names the land; it does not draw it.

Khata number

The account the holding sits under, grouping the Khasra numbers one holder has in the village. A Khatauni search accepts either this or a Khasra number.

Start with the record, so you know what to ask for

Pull the Khatauni for the holding first. It gives you the Khasra numbers exactly as the department writes them, and those are what the map request is keyed on. It also tells you the area, and here the unit matters as much as the number: read it off the record rather than assuming, because the two halves of the state do not use the same one.

Note the district, tehsil and village as the Khatauni spells them. Village names repeat across tehsils, and in the hill districts a Patwari circle can cover a wide and scattered area, which is worth allowing for if a record has to be collected in person.

Getting the map sheets

1. Take every Khasra number in the holding off the Khatauni, not just the first.
2. Ask for the map sheet each Khasra falls on, through the Bhulekh service for your district, tehsil and village, or at the tehsil where a sheet is not served online.
3. Ask for the neighbouring sheet where a boundary you care about runs along the edge of yours, because the line you need continues onto the next sheet.
4. Check each sheet before you move on: the village name, the sheet identifier, and that your Khasra numbers are legible. An unreadable edge is the part you will need when you line the sheets up.

When the sheet and the ground do not match

Much of the hill region has not had a fresh settlement in decades. The map can predate a great deal of sub-division, terracing and building, so a sheet that disagrees with what is on the ground is not necessarily an error in the sheet. Where the two genuinely conflict, that is a measurement request to the tehsil rather than a map request. Assemble the sheets you have first anyway: a surveyor works faster from one continuous drawing than from eight fragments.

Joining the sheets you end up with

A terraced holding across ten Khasra numbers can be four or five sheets, and the boundary that matters is usually the line where two of them meet. Land at a village edge needs sheets from both villages.

Joining them is ordinary work: line the sheets up along the boundaries they share, so the lines that continue across the join actually continue. Done by hand it is fiddly; done on a canvas that snaps edges together it takes a few minutes, and the result is one continuous map you can print, send to a valuer, or take to the tehsil.