ਜਮਾਬੰਦੀ

What does jamabandi mean?

A jamabandi (ਜਮਾਬੰਦੀ, pronounced juh-maa-BUN-dee) is the official land record of a village in Punjab, the register that shows who owns each field, who cultivates it, and what revenue is due. Maintained by the patwari and rewritten fresh every five years, it is the document banks, courts and buyers ask for in any land dealing.

Word origin

Jamabandi belongs to the Persian-flavoured vocabulary of land revenue left behind by the Mughal and British systems. Jama means a total or a collection, and bandi means binding or arranging, literally, the bound record of what the village holds. Words like khasra, khewat, khatauni and fard come from the same world, and villagers still use them every day.

What a jamabandi contains

A jamabandi lists, field by field, the names of owners and tenants, each plot's khasra number, the khewat account it falls under, the share each holder owns, the type of land, and the revenue assessed on it. When land is sold, inherited or gifted, the change is entered through a mutation, so the record keeps pace with who actually holds the land.

How often is the jamabandi updated?

The jamabandi is rewritten from scratch every five years. The village patwari prepares it, a revenue officer checks and attests it, and the whole exercise falls under Section 44 of the Punjab Land Revenue Act of 1887. Between rewrites, the patwari also carries out girdawari, a field-by-field harvest inspection twice a year, in October and March, recording what was sown in the kharif and rabi seasons.

What is the difference between jamabandi and fard?

The jamabandi is the full register; the fard is the certified copy you take with you. When a bank asks for land papers for a loan, or a buyer wants proof before a sale, what they actually want is a fard, an extract of the jamabandi for a particular holding. The two words are often used loosely as synonyms, but strictly speaking the jamabandi is the book and the fard is its page.

How can I check jamabandi online?

Punjab's land records are digitised. The Punjab Land Records Society (PLRS), a Punjab government body, runs the portal jamabandi.punjab.gov.in, where anyone can look up records by owner name, khewat number, khasra number or khatauni number. The term jamabandi itself is used across Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, and in states like Bihar and Himachal Pradesh.