What are the steps involved in buying a BDA site sllotted as compensation to original owners in return for land acquisition to create the layout?

The BDA’s process of forming residential layouts from what is usually agricultural land includes an incentive scheme. This is to make it easy for landowners to voluntarily surrender land. For every acre that the BDA acquires, the landowner is to be given a 60 × 40 site.

In principle, this scheme works out well for the landowner because of the substantial change in land values once the layout is created and the market value appreciation of residential plots over time. However, this is where the process is different from that of a BDA site allotted to a regular applicant.

i.    For the sake of convenience, the BDA registers it in the name of the Khatedar.

ii.    Unlike the normally allotted BDA sites, where all previous titles and titular claims are extinguished and the new allottee becomes the owner, in the case of the compensatory sites, the situation is different. The land would typically be ancestral land, and many individuals can claim rights over the property, such as heirs, minors, etc. Note that this ‘ancestral’ status carries forward into the compensatory site as is.

iii.    In some cases, if the original landowners were illiterate or short of cash even to register the compensatory site to transfer it to their name from the BDA, they would have then drawn up sale agreements with third parties or brokers. In such cases, it has been observed that sometimes the owners have gotten into agreements even before they are allotted the sites.

iv.    These agreement holders then carry out the rest of the site acquisition formalities. They sometimes pay the money for the registering the site itself.

All this would have happened by the time you run into such a site, when you are prospecting.