What Banglarbhumi charges for — and what it doesn't

The line that matters: looking versus getting a copy

Banglarbhumi's charging model is simpler than it looks, and it comes down to one distinction. Looking at information on screen carries no fee. Getting the government to produce and deliver a document does.

But free is not the same as open, and conflating the two is the mistake this page used to make. You still need a banglarbhumi.gov.in account to run a lookup — the portal will send you to sign-in the moment you request a record. What it will not do is charge you for it. So there are two gates here, not one: the account, which is free to create and applies to everything; and the fee, which applies only to a defined set of services.

The moment you want something the department has generated, signed or acted on — a copy, a map, a certificate, a mutation — you are past the second gate too: fee territory, behind the login, under Citizen Services.

What costs nothing

These are the lookups. The department charges nothing for any of them — though you will need to be signed in to use them:

• Know Your Property — khatian and plot details by District, Block and Mouza.
• RS-LR Plot Information — how a plot reads across record generations.
• Mutation Case Status — the public status check on a mutation case.
• Conversion Case Status — the same for a land conversion case.
• Mouza Information — the Mouza list with JL numbers, covered in finding your Mouza and JL number.
• Query Search — lookup by query number.
• Public Grievance — raising a complaint with the department; see the grievance page.

What carries a fee

Two families of service charge, and both sit behind the login under Citizen Services.

Service Delivery is the document-request menu. You are asking the department to produce and deliver a specific record, so each request is priced:

• ROR Request — the record-of-rights extract; see porcha and ROR download.
• Plot Info. Request and Plot Map Request — plot details and the plot map.
• Mouza Map Request — the Mouza map sheet.
• Signed ROR/PI/PLM Copy(s) — the signed versions. Whoever is asking for the copy will tell you whether it has to be a signed one — confirm with them before paying for the wrong thing.
• No Due Certificate — certification that no land revenue is outstanding against a holding; see the no-due certificate page.

The Online Fees Calculator is the only figure worth trusting

The portal provides an Online Fees Calculator under Citizen Services, and it exists precisely because the answer is not a single number. What a service costs depends on the service, on what you are asking for, and in several cases on the characteristics of the land itself.

This is why you will find no amounts on this page, and none anywhere else in this cluster. Fee schedules are revised. Any figure we published would be correct for a while and then quietly wrong, and the person harmed by that would be someone who budgeted against it or who used it to argue with an office. The calculator is maintained by the department and reflects the current position; we are not, and would not.

Treat every fee figure you encounter outside the portal the same way — including on other websites, in YouTube videos, and in forum answers. If it did not come from the calculator or from the portal's own payment screen, it is a claim about the past.

How paying actually works

Payment on Banglarbhumi runs through the state treasury system, and understanding the sequence is what makes payment problems tractable later. Four stages, and a different number is created at each:

• Fees Payment under Online Application, or eChallan Generation under eChallan Application, is where you initiate. eChallan Generation is the sole item under the eChallan Application submenu.
• The challan is generated — and the GRN is issued at that moment, before you have paid anything. The GRN identifies the challan. It is not proof of payment and it is not created by paying. Note it down as soon as it appears.
• You pay. Online, at a Bangla Sahayata Kendra, or over a bank counter against the GRIPS challan. The bank issues a BRN — and it is the BRN, not the GRN, that confirms the money actually moved.
• Reconciliation. The treasury records receipt and the department credits it against your application or holding. GRN Search under Citizen Services is where you verify the first part — note that it is available only for about a month from the date of application, so check it early rather than months later.

Pricing a case before you commit to it

If you are planning a piece of work — a purchase check, a mutation, a set of documents for a bank — price it as a whole rather than discovering the charges one screen at a time.

Work out which of your steps are free lookups and which are chargeable requests. Then run the Online Fees Calculator for each chargeable item and add them up. That total is your budget, and it is a number you produced from the government's own tool rather than from anyone's quote.

Two things commonly get missed in this exercise. The first is that a signed copy is a different request from an unsigned one, and it is usually the signed copy that the bank or the buyer will accept. The second is that a mutation is not one charge — the application, and the documents you will need alongside it, are separately priced.

The middleman problem

The most expensive misunderstanding on this portal is not any particular fee. It is not knowing that the free services are free.

A quoted 'government fee' very often bundles three different things: the actual statutory charge, the agent's own service charge, and an unstated margin. Presented as a single number, it is impossible to argue with — which is the point of presenting it as a single number.

There is nothing wrong with paying someone for their time, and for many people it is a sensible use of money. But it should be a decision you make with the numbers separated. Ask what the government charge is, ask what the service charge is, and check the first against the Online Fees Calculator yourself.

• Ask for the two numbers separately — government charge and service charge — before agreeing to anything.
• Verify the government charge in the calculator, on your own device.
• Ask for the GRN and the challan. A genuine payment against your application produces both, and they are yours to have.
• Never hand over your Banglarbhumi credentials. Enter them only on the portal's own sign-in, never on any other site, app or person's phone.
• Be suspicious of any offer to skip a step. Nobody bypasses the government's sign-in, its CAPTCHA, its payment gateway or its fees. An offer to do so is either a fiction or something you do not want to be part of.