Your name is on the deed. It is not yet on the record.

A sale deed is registered. The buyer has a stamped document, a receipt and a photograph of themselves signing. Most people believe the transaction is finished. It is half finished.

What is mutation?

Mutation — intkaal — is the entry that updates the revenue record to show you as the owner. Registration records that a transfer happened. Mutation records that it happened to you, in the register the state actually consults.

Until it is done, the jamabandi still reads the seller's name. You own the property; the record does not say so.

Why it matters, concretely

• A bank will not lend against it. The legal opinion stops at the revenue record.
• You cannot sell cleanly. Your buyer's advocate will raise it, and your price will carry the discount for the trouble.
• Electricity and water transfers stall, because the utility asks for the record, not the deed.
• In an inheritance it compounds. Two undone mutations across two generations is a title problem that costs real money to unpick.

How long does it take?

Weeks rather than days, and it is not automatic. Somebody has to file it, follow it and collect it. A file left to itself sits.

Where a property has passed through several hands without mutation, each link has to be established in order. That is the expensive case, and it is the one we meet most often on inherited land in the hills.

Whose job is it?

Formally the buyer benefits, so the buyer should pursue it. In practice the seller's cooperation is often needed, and it evaporates once the money has moved. Agree in writing, before completion, who files the mutation and by when.

What we do

We treat a file as open until the revenue record reads the buyer's name — not until the deed is signed. That is a deliberate difference. It is the point at which a purchase is actually finished, and it is the step most easily skipped by anybody paid on the transaction rather than on the outcome.