Buying an NA plot in Maharashtra: the order, the zone and the gunthewari risk

A flat purchase is a purchase of a share in a building somebody else is responsible for. A plot purchase is a purchase of the ground itself, and every question the builder would have answered becomes yours: is this land allowed to be built on, is it in a zone that permits what you intend, was the layout ever approved, and is there an authority that will actually issue a building permission when you apply. Maharashtra changed the first of those questions in December 2025, which has made a lot of plot advice on the internet quietly out of date.

What changed, and what did not#

For decades the answer to "is this plot buildable" began with a single document: the NA order, or sanad, by which the collector converted the land from agricultural to non-agricultural use under sections 44 and 44A of the Maharashtra Land Revenue Code, after which an annual non-agricultural assessment was payable.

The Second Amendment Act of 2025, assented to on 31 December 2025, deleted both sections. Where the use you propose is permissible in the sanctioned Development Plan or Regional Plan, the planning authority's approval of the building plan is now itself the non-agricultural permission, against a one time premium rather than a perpetual annual levy, and no sanad is issued. The mechanics, the slabs and the arithmetic of what a conversion now costs are set out in Maharashtra's new one time NA premium.

Two things follow for a plot buyer:

• Zoning now decides conversion. The shortcut works only where the draft or final plan already permits the use. A plot in an agricultural or green zone, or under a public reservation, gets no conversion from a building permission: it needs a change in the plan, or the Collector's separate route, and a seller describing it as NA changes neither.
• History is history. Every plot converted before the amendment carries an NA order in its title chain, and that document is still what proves the conversion happened, on what conditions, and for what use. Ask for it. A seller who cannot produce it for a plot they describe as NA has told you something.

The verification stack#

Plot diligence has a strict order, because a failure high in the stack makes everything below it irrelevant.

An analogy: the driving licence and the road#

An NA order is a driving licence. It says this land is permitted, in principle, to leave agriculture and carry a building. The zone in the development plan is the road: it decides where that licence can actually be used and for what. A licence with no road is a plot that is legally non-agricultural and sits inside a green belt where nothing may be constructed. A road with no licence is land in a perfectly good residential zone that nobody ever converted. Buyers check one and assume the other, and the gap between the two is where most plot money is lost.

Gunthewari, the risk that decides the purchase#

Guntha is a unit of about 101 square metres. A gunthewari development is agricultural land informally cut into small plots and sold, typically without layout approval, without conversion and without the planning authority ever seeing a drawing. It is not a fringe phenomenon; it is how large parts of several Maharashtra cities were actually built.

The Maharashtra Gunthewari Developments (Regularisation, Upgradation and Control) Act, 2001 provides the route out: on an application to the planning authority and payment of prescribed charges, such a development can be regularised, and on regularisation it is deemed converted to non-agricultural use for the purposes of the Land Revenue Code. A 2021 amendment moved the eligibility cut-off forward to plots that existed on or before 31 December 2020, which brought a large body of later development inside the scheme.

The route exists; the traffic on it is slow. Nearly 1.5 lakh gunthewari plots in the Nagpur metropolitan region remain unregularised, The Hitavada reported in August 2026, and the sticking point it named is the Act's requirement that 10 percent of a layout's plottable land vest free of cost with the planning authority for public use. Elsewhere, authorities have used discounts to move the queue: the Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar metropolitan authority offered a 90 percent concession on regularisation charges until 31 July 2026, 50 percent from 1 August to 31 October 2026, and full charges from 1 November 2026.

What the register shows about plotted schemes#

A plotted development above the Section 3 thresholds must register with MahaRERA like any other project, and the register is a surprisingly good check on plot schemes because the promoter has to file the layout, the plot inventory and the sales position under penalty for falsehood.

Across the 55,913 published Maharashtra registrations as updated on 21 September 2026, 3,116 file individual plot rows, together covering 3,10,061 plots. Where they are is the first thing that stands out.

Nagpur alone holds two in five registered plotted schemes, and Nagpur, Wardha and Chandrapur together hold about half. The same region carries the largest reported gunthewari backlog: plotted development is how these cities grow, and the register and the regularisation queue look like two views of one market.

Three more readings from the same filings, each of which a plot buyer can use:

• Most filed plots are filed as unsold, and the table goes stale. Of the 3.10 lakh plot rows, 26.5 percent are filed as sold or booked, and in schemes filed as completed the share is barely higher, 27.1 percent, which says the table is often not kept up after sales rather than that nothing sold. Either way, the filing cannot confirm a broker's "only three plots left"; ask for the promoter's current allotment list and check it against the filed table.
• Plotted registrations lapse slightly more often than the register as a whole. Of plotted projects filing a status, 28.7 percent carry a lapsed registration, against 25.0 percent across all published Maharashtra registrations. Not a dramatic gap, but the wrong direction.
• Plots are the one place RERA publishes real transaction values. Promoters of plotted schemes file the agreement consideration per plot, which they never do for flats. About 590 plotted projects file at least one, covering 27,350 plots, with a median filed consideration of about Rs 21.3 lakh, a quarter under Rs 11 lakh and a quarter above Rs 42.4 lakh. Beside the registered-deed record, where Index II carries the consideration of each registered sale, it is the only public price record grouped by scheme.

One point cuts the other way and is worth stating plainly. MahaRERA's Order No. 62/2024 of 22 October 2024 clarified that a project is exempt from registration where the land proposed to be developed is 500 square metres or less, or where the number of plots or units is eight or fewer. Plenty of legitimate small layouts therefore sit outside the register entirely. For a flat, "not on MahaRERA" is close to a deal-breaker. For a small plot scheme it may simply mean the scheme is small, and the verification then falls back entirely on the revenue record, the zone and the layout sanction.

Priya and Arjun price two plots#

Priya and Arjun, spreadsheet-minded as always, shortlisted two plots on Pune's eastern fringe. One was Rs 38 lakh in a MahaRERA-registered layout with a sanctioned road network and every plot numbered on the approved drawing. The other was Rs 24 lakh, described as "NA sanad available, gunthewari regularisation applied", in a layout that existed only on the broker's printout.

The Rs 14 lakh gap looked like a bargain until they priced what the cheaper plot could not do. No bank would lend against it, so the whole amount had to come from savings. No building permission could be applied for until regularisation issued, on a queue with no stated date. And the eventual resale market was limited to buyers willing to accept the same uncertainty. They bought the registered plot, and treated the Rs 14 lakh as the price of a plot they could actually build on within the year. Names and numbers in this story are illustrative.

Where the rest of the file sits#

Zoning is the check that overrides everything else, and it has its own reading: what a reservation on the neighbouring land means for you is in the reserved plot next to you, and which rulebook and which authority govern your particular plot are in which rulebook governs your plot and who signs your development permission. On the title side, pull an encumbrance certificate for at least 13 years, and 30 where the chain of owners is long, before the booking amount, and run the full document checklist, which applies to land with the RERA layer thinned out.

For a registered plotted scheme, the promoter's filings are public. ReraGenie's free project pages carry each registration's status, promised dates, documents and complaints for every covered Maharashtra project, and the Rs 499 buyer report reads the filing for red flags and the promoter's record across its other registrations. The plot table itself is read in the Rs 2,999 project analysis, which states how many plots are sold, the median filed price per square metre, and the rates filed by plotted schemes around it.

The 60-second summary#

Start with the 7/12 extract and read its remarks column. Establish the conversion position, remembering that since the December 2025 amendment a new conversion rides on the building permission wherever the plan permits the use, while an older plot still proves its conversion through its NA order. Check the zone in the sanctioned development plan before you fall in love with the plot, because zoning beats title. Insist on a sanctioned layout with your plot number on it. And on gunthewari, accept only a regularisation order with a number and a date, because until that exists the plot cannot be built on, borrowed against, or sold to anyone careful.

This article is educational and not legal advice. Land classification, zoning and regularisation turn on the specific revenue record and the specific planning authority; have an advocate examine the title before you commit.