Agricultural Land Title Dispute in Karnataka: When a Sale Deed Has No Signatures and Mutation Was Never Done

The land had been in the family for generations. Nobody expected a court summons to arrive in early March 2019, more than fifty years after the alleged sale had supposedly taken place. Our client's family — based in Dharwad, Karnataka — received a civil suit filed by the grandchildren of one Ramesh Patil, who claimed that their grandfather had purchased agricultural land from a woman named Savitri Kulkarni back in April 1969. The problem? Not a single revenue document — not the RTC, not the mutation register, not the Encumbrance Certificate — showed Savitri Kulkarni as owner of the land at any point. The land remained registered in the name of her deceased father right up to 2018, when it was transferred to Savitri's grandsons and legal heirs through proper succession records.

Ramesh Patil's grandchildren produced only a certified copy of the alleged sale deed and an EC extract. No original deed. No thumb impressions. No signatures of the seller or witnesses on the certified copy. And critically, Ramesh Patil himself had been shown in revenue records as a tenant — not an owner — from 1969 right up to his death in 1993. No khata transfer was ever sought. No mutation was ever applied for. For over five decades, the family now filing the suit had taken no legal steps to assert ownership.

The family had initially consulted a local advocate in Dharwad who filed a written statement but didn't press the evidentiary weaknesses effectively. When the matter reached a critical stage around late 2021, they approached Advocate Sudhir Rao. The approach shifted immediately: a focused challenge on the plaintiff's title documents, the evidentiary value of a certified copy lacking attestation, and the continuous, unbroken possession of the defendant family for over 55 years. The court was persuaded to take a hard look at whether the plaintiffs had established any prima facie title at all. The matter moved toward a favourable outcome for the defendants.

You can read about this case in detail at https://sudhirrao.com/agricultural-land-title-dispute-karnataka-sale-deed-no-signa/