Patta, Chitta and EC — What Each One Proves

Patta is the revenue record naming who holds a piece of land; chitta recorded its type and extent. Since 2015 Tamil Nadu merged them into a single record, so a seller still producing an old, standalone chitta is a small signal the records were never updated — worth a second look. For agricultural or plot land the patta is central; for a city flat, ownership runs through the apartment's documents and the undivided share of land, which is why the flat buyer's key record is often the TSLR extract rather than a rural-style patta.

The Encumbrance Certificate lists the registered transactions against a property over a period — sales, mortgages, gifts — so it's how you confirm the chain of ownership and that no registered loan is outstanding. Here is the gap that catches buyers: an EC shows only what was registered. Pending litigation, a partition dispute among heirs, an unregistered agreement, or a court stay order will not appear in it. A clean EC is the wrong basis for full confidence if you treat it as a clean bill of health — it is necessary evidence, not sufficient proof.

FIFSCORE™ treats these as a set rather than a checkbox: patta/chitta current and correctly named, the TSLR extract for a flat, an EC over a meaningful span, and the parent documents behind it — with a professional title search where any of them shows a gap. Read together they close most of the risk; read in isolation, each leaves a blind spot. The guide is built so a first-time or overseas buyer knows what a clean version of each looks like and when to escalate to a lawyer rather than guess. None of these documents is hard to obtain; the discipline is insisting on all of them, in current form and the correct name, before any money moves — because the cost of skipping one shows up only later.