Land Record Extract in Maharashtra (7/12 Satbara, 8A and Property Card on MahaBhulekh)

What is a 7/12 extract in Maharashtra?

The 7/12 extract, called satbara utara in Marathi, is the Record of Rights for a piece of agricultural land in Maharashtra. Village Form VII records who holds the land, the area, the tenure and the mutations registered against it, and Village Form XII records the crops grown season by season. The two forms are printed together, which is why the document is universally called the "saat-baara".

The Department of Land Records, working under the Revenue and Forest Department, maintains these records. The office of the Collector and Director, Land Records at the New Administrative Building, Council Hall, Pune is the state-level authority for them, and can be reached on 020-26050006 or at dlrmah.mah@nic.in.

Maharashtra publishes the records on MAHA Bhulekh at bhulekh.mahabhumi.gov.in. The site states that it is "Maharashtra Bhumi Abhilekh" and offers three document types to citizens free of cost: the 7/12 extract, the 8A extract and the Property Card.

Which document do you actually need?

Maharashtra keeps three different citizen-facing land records, and asking for the wrong one wastes a trip.

• 7/12 extract, for one survey number or gat number of agricultural land. It shows the khatedar names, the area, tenure class, encumbrances noted, and the crop entries.
• 8A extract. A khatedar-wise summary. It lists every survey number that one holder owns in that village, which is what you need when a bank or a scheme asks for total landholding.
• Property Card, for surveyed non-agricultural plots in city survey areas. Urban plots in Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur and other city survey towns do not have a 7/12 at all; the Property Card is their equivalent.

Who can view Maharashtra land records?

Any person can view them. Maharashtra land records are public documents, and MAHA Bhulekh imposes no login, no ownership test and no relationship requirement for free viewing. A buyer checking a plot before paying an advance has exactly the same access as the registered owner.

There are limits worth knowing:

• You cannot change an entry online. Viewing is open to everyone; correction, mutation and name-change are separate Revenue Department processes handled by the Talathi and Tahsildar.
• You cannot get a 7/12 for an urban city-survey plot. Those plots are not eligible for a 7/12; ask for the Property Card instead.
• A free MAHA Bhulekh printout is not a legal document. Where a bank, court or registrar demands a signed record, an unsigned screen print is refused.

How to get a 7/12 or 8A extract in Maharashtra online

Follow these steps on the official portal. The free route and the paid signed-copy route are two different websites, so do them in order.

1. Open bhulekh.mahabhumi.gov.in in a browser. This is the official MAHA Bhulekh site of the Department of Land Records; the address ends in mahabhumi.gov.in and nothing else.
2. Choose your revenue division; Amravati, Aurangabad, Konkan, Nagpur, Nashik or Pune — from the selector on the landing screen. The portal is organised division-first, unlike most state Bhulekh sites.
3. Pick the record type: 7/12, 8A or Property Card.
4. Select district, taluka and village from the dropdown lists that appear next.
5. Search for the plot using the survey number or gat number, or, if you do not have it, by the khatedar's first name, middle name, surname or full name.
6. Open the record and read it. Check the khatedar names, the area, the other rights column and the mutation numbers against whatever document you are verifying. Viewing and printing at this stage cost nothing.
7. For a legally usable copy, go to digitalsatbara.mahabhumi.gov.in. This portal issues digitally signed Records of Rights for lands in Maharashtra and states that they can be used for all official and legal purposes.
8. Register once, using the New User Registration link, then sign in with either the regular login or the OTP-based login.
9. Add money to the wallet through the SBI ePay payment gateway shown at the payment step, and request the digitally signed 7/12, 8A or Property Card. Pay only the amount the portal itself displays.

How to get a land record from the Talathi office instead

The offline route still exists and is the only route for a manually certified copy or for a correction.

1. Visit the Talathi of the saza in which the village falls, carrying the survey number or gat number and a photo identity.
2. Ask for the certified 7/12 or 8A and pay the fee the office records in its receipt book. Insist on a receipt.
3. For an urban plot, go to the City Survey Office (Nagar Bhumapan Karyalaya) of that city instead, which holds the Property Card.
4. For a wrong or missing entry, file the request with the Talathi, who prepares the mutation entry; the Tahsildar or Sub-Divisional Officer decides contested cases.

How do you check whether a mutation has been recorded?

Mutation: pherfar in Marathi; is the step that actually moves ownership into the record after a sale deed is registered. Registration at the Sub-Registrar and mutation at the Talathi are two separate events, and buyers are regularly caught out by the gap between them.

Read the 7/12 you pulled from MAHA Bhulekh and look at the mutation numbers noted on it, then compare them with the sale deed number. If the sale is registered but the 7/12 still shows the seller, the mutation has not been certified yet and you follow it up with the Talathi, not with the Sub-Registrar.

Does a 7/12 extract expire?

No. A 7/12 extract has no expiry date, because it is a copy of a live register rather than a certificate with a validity period. What matters instead is how recent the copy is. Banks, sub-registrars and government departments routinely insist on an extract not older than a stated number of days, so pull a fresh copy for each transaction rather than reusing an old printout.

Why does a land record request fail?

The commonest problems in Maharashtra are these:

• Wrong village selected. Many talukas have two villages with similar names; the record simply will not be found.
• Name spelt differently in the record. Older entries carry Marathi spellings and ancestral names. Search by survey number wherever possible.
• Plot is in a city survey area. No 7/12 exists; the Property Card is the record.
• Records under updation. Some villages appear blank while data is being re-verified or during scheduled portal maintenance, which MAHA Bhulekh announces on its home page.
• Payment failed at the Digital Satbara step. The portal directs payment failure queries to your own bank, and the wallet money stays on the portal rather than being refunded.

Is the process free, and what about agents?

MAHA Bhulekh viewing of the 7/12, 8A and Property Card is free. The only money that should ever change hands is the amount the Digital Satbara portal charges at its own payment step for a digitally signed copy, or the fee recorded on a receipt at the Talathi or City Survey office.

Do not pay an agent, a cyber café or a WhatsApp "7/12 service" a service charge for a document you can view yourself in under five minutes. If someone quotes a rate for a plain 7/12 printout, they are selling you a free public record.

Where do you complain?

Take an incorrect or missing entry first to the Talathi, then to the Tahsildar of the taluka, and then to the Sub-Divisional Officer. For portal failures, records missing for an entire village, or a digitally signed copy that will not download, write to the Department of Land Records at dlrmah.mah@nic.in or call the office of the Collector and Director, Land Records in Pune on 020-26050006. Payment gateway failures on Digital Satbara are, by the portal's own instruction, taken up with your bank first.

How to check your application status

Viewing a 7/12, 8A extract or Property Card on MAHA Bhulekh is not an "application" in the usual sense: there is no queue, no reference number and no waiting period, since the record displays the moment you select the village and search the survey number. The status-check question actually comes up in three other situations, and each one is tracked differently.

Checking a mutation you have asked the Talathi to record. If you have registered a sale deed and then asked the Talathi to update the 7/12 in your name, that request goes through a manual mutation process rather than an online tracker. MAHA Bhulekh itself has no "track my mutation" screen; instead:

• Pull a fresh 7/12 for the same survey number on bhulekh.mahabhumi.gov.in every few weeks and check whether the mutation number and khatedar name have changed. This is the only way to confirm on your own that the mutation has actually gone through.
• If the mutation still has not appeared after a reasonable interval, follow up in person with the same Talathi office where you filed it, quoting the mutation entry number from your receipt.
• If the Talathi is unresponsive or the entry is contested, escalate to the Tahsildar of the taluka, and then to the Sub-Divisional Officer, in that order, rather than approaching the Sub-Registrar (who has no role in mutation once the deed is registered).

Checking a payment or download on Digital Satbara. A digitally signed 7/12, 8A or Property Card bought on digitalsatbara.mahabhumi.gov.in is generated against your prepaid wallet balance at the time you request it, so there is normally no pending state to check; either the signed document downloads immediately or the payment has not gone through. If money was deducted by the SBI ePay gateway but the wallet was not credited or the document was not issued, the portal's own instruction is to raise this with your bank first, since the failure sits on the payment-gateway side rather than inside MAHA Bhulekh's records.

Checking a correction or complaint you have raised offline. For a name-spelling error, a missing entry, or a record stuck under "updation" for longer than expected, there is no online complaint ID either. Call the office of the Collector and Director, Land Records in Pune on 020-26050006, or write to dlrmah.mah@nic.in, quoting the district, taluka, village and survey number, and ask for the status of your correction request against the date you first filed it with the Talathi.