You go to the patwari with a question about your father's land. He opens a register and points to a khasra number. Another name is written against it. You start to worry. Is the land still yours?
Two records answer that question. One is the khasra. The other is the girdawari. Together they sit at the bottom of every land record in Pakistan. The fard, the mutation, the jamabandi, all of them build on these two.
What is a khasra number?
The khasra is the list of every field in a village. Each field has its own number, called the khasra number. The number is the identity of that piece of land, the way a CNIC number identifies a person. When anyone talks about your land, from the patwari to the court, they use the khasra number.
The official training manual on land and property rights in Pakistan describes the khasra number as a portion of land whose area is entered separately under its own number in the record of rights. The same manual defines the khasra as the list of village fields. Every land document, from the fard to the mutation, refers to land by its khasra number.
What is girdawari?
Girdawari is the crop inspection. Twice a year the patwari walks every field in his circle. He checks what is sown, who is cultivating it, and who is actually in possession. Then he writes what he saw in a register. That register is the khasra girdawari, or the crop inspection register.
The inspections happen twice a year because Pakistan has two crop seasons. Kharif is the autumn crop. Rabi is the spring crop. The Board of Revenue's own instructions say the kharif inspection starts on 1 September and the rabi inspection on 1 March. The commissioner can fix different dates for a district, and the deputy commissioner can postpone an inspection by up to 15 days when the crop ripens late.
What is written in the register?
The form of the register comes from Rule 39 of the West Pakistan Land Revenue Rules 1968. For every khasra number it shows:
- the name of the owner and the khewat number
- the name of the cultivator and the khatauni number
- the area and the class of the soil
- the kharif crop
- the rabi crop
- any change in rights, cultivation, possession or rent
One field can carry two names. The owner holds the title. The cultivator works the land. When the two are different people, both names appear in the girdawari.
What do the entries mean?
The register uses short words that look strange at first. Here is what the common ones mean:
- chahi means the land is irrigated by a well
- nahri means it is irrigated by a canal
- barani means it depends on rain
- khali means the field is not under crop this season
- kharaba means the crop failed or was destroyed
- banjar jadid means the land has not been sown for four straight harvests
- banjar qadeem means it has stayed waste for much longer
- ghair mumkin means the land cannot be cultivated, like a road, a graveyard or the bed of a nullah
These classes come from the official training manual and the Board of Revenue's girdawari instructions.
Why does girdawari matter to you?
Because it records possession, not just ownership. Courts and revenue officers use the girdawari to see who is actually farming the land. In a dispute over possession, the girdawari entries are often the first thing they check. If you are checking a property before buying, the girdawari tells you whether the seller is the one actually farming it.
It also matters when your crop is damaged. If a hailstorm or a flood destroys the crop, the patwari records it as kharaba. That entry is the basis for crop damage claims and for remission of land revenue. After a serious hailstorm the rules require a special girdawari, inspected by a senior revenue officer and not just the patwari.
Tenants should watch their entries too. The girdawari shows the cultivator's name and the rent. Changes in possession and rent are noted harvest by harvest in a separate register called the taghayyurat. If a tenant's name is missing, that can weaken their claim.
Women's names belong in these records as well. The same official manual says women are sometimes left out of the khasra girdawari and other records, and that this practice is illegal. A woman owner should see her name against her own land.
What if an entry is wrong?
Revenue records are presumed to be true until the opposite is proved. That is what Section 52 of the West Pakistan Land Revenue Act 1967 says. So a wrong entry cannot be ignored.
For a clerical error or a clear mistake, the collector can correct the record. The civil court does not have jurisdiction to correct entries in the record of rights or the mutation register. That correction goes through the revenue chain, from the patwari to the kanungo and up.
If the dispute is about who truly owns the land, that is a different matter. The Act lets a person whose rights are affected file a declaratory suit in the civil court to establish their title. The girdawari is evidence, not the final word on ownership.
How to check your khasra girdawari
In Punjab the record has been digitized. The Punjab Land Records Authority runs the Punjab Zameen portal, the Arazi Moawin centers and the Arazi Record Centers. You can get a fard there and ask for the crop record. PLRA has also launched a digital gardawari app, where field staff record crop information with geo tagging.
The fard itself costs Rs 50 per khatoni and up to Rs 150 per khewat, plus PLRA service charges.
In other provinces the patwari and the tehsil office remain the place to ask. The copy is usually issued through the revenue staff of the estate.
How it fits with your other papers
The khasra number ties every document together. The fard shows ownership. The mutation shows how ownership changed. The girdawari shows who is farming the land today. If you are buying land, all three should point to the same person.
Start with the fard, then check the mutation history, then look at the girdawari entries. That is the whole due diligence in three steps. Read more on the Lexiber blog, or ask a question about your land on lexiber.com.
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