New survey number to old survey number

Why the old number still matters after the land was renumbered

The number your patta carries today is the one every current office will ask for. It is not the number the older records are filed under. An encumbrance certificate covering the years before the resurvey, a sale deed from a previous generation, a partition deed, a mortgage that was never discharged on paper: each of those was written and indexed against the number the land had at the time. Search only on the current number and those entries do not come back as "none found", they simply never enter the search at all.

That is the practical risk this page exists to remove. A clean encumbrance certificate on a current number is not a clean history if the land was renumbered and the earlier years were never searched.

A town survey number is not unique on its own

A revenue survey number is unique within its village. A town survey number is not: it is unique only inside its block, and a town has many. Ask this page for 66/1 in Pallavaram and it returns 34 parcels in 34 different blocks, each with a different owner, a different extent and a different earlier number. One of them is yours and the other 33 are other people's land.

Your patta or town survey extract prints the ward and the block beside the number, and that pair is what identifies the parcel. Any tool that answers a bare town survey number with a single result is not being helpful, it is concealing the other thirty-three. A village survey number does not behave this way: it is unique within its village, so only its sub-divisions are listed.

One parcel, several earlier numbers

Where a parcel was assembled from parts of several old fields, the register records all of them in one entry, commonly with part markers, as in 59/10PT, 56/1PT, 59/1PT or the village form 1322-B 1323-B. Each is listed separately here, and each is worth searching: an older document concerning any one of those fields may concern your ground. Treat the list as a set of search keys, not as alternatives to choose between.

Reading a village answer

The village A-register keeps an earlier number against effectively every parcel, but it is doing one of two different jobs and it does not say which. Sometimes it is a genuine pre-resurvey number from the Updating Registry renumbering, where the old and current numbers bear no resemblance to each other. Sometimes it is a lineage pointer: the parent survey and sub-division the parcel was carved out of, written like 71-2A1 for what is now 71-2A1A. The clue is whether it resembles the parcel's own number. This page prints the number exactly as the register writes it and leaves that reading to you, because guessing wrong in either direction sends a title search to the wrong place.

When no earlier number is recorded

A blank means the register holds no earlier number for that entry. It does not mean the number never changed, and it should not be read as reassurance. The district survey office's correlation statement and the margin of the field measurement sketch are the next places to look, and for town land the old survey number is also printed on the town survey extract itself.