Courts in Faridabad — and the licence question nobody asks before buying

The court itself — Sector 12, and what it covers

Faridabad became a district on 15 August 1979. Its district courts followed a little over a year later, on 8 December 1980. For once in this series of pages we can give you the location with some confidence, because the court publishes it: the complex is in Sector 12, described on the court's own site as about a mile from the National Highway, with nineteen courtrooms, all air conditioned.

That is more than we could establish for either Gurugram or Noida, and it is worth saying why it matters. A hearing morning goes wrong in small ways — the wrong gate, the wrong block, twenty minutes looking for a staircase — and those small ways are what turn a manageable day into a missed one. Knowing the complex before you arrive removes most of it.

What it does not remove is the room. Court numbers are allotted and reallotted, and the only reliable source for yours is the cause list for that date or your advocate. Ask for the building and the court number as one question, because either alone will leave you walking.

What Faridabad shares with the rest of Haryana

A good deal, and we are not going to explain it twice. Faridabad is in Haryana, so the answers below are the same ones that apply in Gurugram, and we have set them out properly there rather than thinning them across two pages.

If you arrived here from Delhi and none of that is familiar, read the Gurugram page first. The rest of this one is about something Faridabad has more of than its neighbours.

The question nobody asks in time

Here is how it usually goes.

A plot is shown. There is a layout drawing with numbered plots on it, a boundary wall going up at one end, a few houses already built, somebody's uncle who bought here two years ago and is perfectly happy. The rate is good precisely because something about it is not quite settled, though nobody puts it that way. Payment is made, a deed of some kind is signed, and a family starts building.

Nobody asks whether the colony holds a licence. It does not come up, because the people in the conversation are a buyer who has never bought land before and a seller who would rather it did not.

Five years later the question arrives anyway. It comes as a bank declining the file, or a buyer walking away after his lawyer looked at the papers, or a notice about construction, or an inheritance where the heirs discover that what their father owned is harder to describe than they assumed. By then nothing can be done cheaply.

The licence, and who grants it

Haryana's law on this is the Haryana Development and Regulation of Urban Areas Act, 1975. Its purpose is stated in the Act itself: to regulate the use of land in order to prevent ill-planned and haphazard urbanisation in or around towns in the State of Haryana. That sentence is more than fifty years old and still describes the problem exactly.

The mechanism is a licence. Section 3 is the provision under which somebody applies for one:

The Director is defined in the Act as the Director, Town and Country Planning, Haryana. So the licence is a State grant, obtained from a named authority, with a number — which is exactly why it can be verified, and exactly why a seller who has one will produce it in the first conversation.

Section 7 — the prohibition people quote wrongly

This is worth getting right, because it is got wrong constantly, including by people who sound confident. Section 3 does not ban anything. It tells you how to apply. The prohibition is in Section 7:

Read who the section is aimed at. “No person including a property dealer” — the seller, the developer, the agent. It prohibits transferring, agreeing to transfer, advertising and receiving money. The conduct it describes is the conduct of somebody selling you a plot.

That has an obvious implication and a less obvious one. The obvious one is that if you were sold a plot in an unlicensed colony, the Act's prohibition was being broken by the person who sold it. The less obvious one is that a prohibition on the seller is not, by itself, a rule about what you now hold — which is the subject of two sections below.

What Section 10 provides

Alongside that, the Director or an authorised officer may call on a person who has committed a breach to stop further construction and to show cause why restoration to the original state should not be ordered. That is the provision behind the notices people in such colonies occasionally receive and then put in a drawer.

One caution about the figure. We have quoted the text as we found it; we could not confirm whether these provisions have been amended since. If a penalty is actually in issue for you, have the current text checked rather than relying on a quotation, including ours.

The word “coloniser”, and the trap in it

Now a detail that sounds like pedantry and is not. The Act defines its own terms, and two of them matter here. A colony is an area of land divided or proposed to be divided into plots or flats for residential, commercial, industrial, cyber city or cyber park purposes. And a coloniser is defined as a person owning land for converting it into a colony and to whom a licence has been granted under this Act.

Read that second definition again. In the language of the statute, a coloniser is somebody who has the licence. A developer who is laying out plots without one is not a coloniser at all in the Act's sense. He is a person doing what Section 7 prohibits.

Where this leaves the buyer — honestly

You now want the answer to the question this whole page has been circling. If the colony had no licence, what is my purchase worth?

We are not going to tell you, and we would like to explain why rather than simply decline.

We went through the Act looking for two things. First, a provision saying that a sale in an unlicensed colony is void or of no effect — we did not find one. Second, a provision protecting the buyer in such a transaction — we did not find one of those either. We also looked for a ruling of the Punjab and Haryana High Court or the Supreme Court dealing squarely with the position of a plot buyer in an unlicensed Haryana colony, and we did not find one.

Not finding something is not the same as it not existing, and we are not going to dress up the one as the other. What we can say is this: your position depends on your own documents — what was executed, by whom, whether it was registered, what the revenue record shows, how the land came to the seller — and on facts that are specific to your plot. That is an advocate's work with your file in front of them. Anybody who answers it from a website, in either direction, is guessing.

The one judgment worth knowing, and its limits

There is a decision that is useful to know exists, provided you also know what it does not do.

In Rimpy Kansal v. State of Haryana, decided by the Punjab and Haryana High Court in December 2018, the question was whether purchasers of plots within municipal limits, each smaller than a thousand square metres, were themselves required to hold a licence. The court held they were not, found no violation of Sections 3 and 7(ii) on those facts, and quashed the FIR against them.

Three things follow, and the third is the important one. It concerned buyers, not the developer. It turned on the size of the plots and their location inside municipal limits. And it was about criminal proceedings against those buyers — not about the quality of their title. So it is a real decision on a real point, and it is not a general answer about whether a purchase stands.

There is also a Supreme Court decision from November 2021, State of Haryana v. Shalimar Estates Pvt. Ltd., which deals with the developer's side rather than the buyer's. We mention it so that you know it is about something else if somebody waves it at you.

What the State actually does: deficient areas

“Our colony has been regularised” is said a great deal in Faridabad. It is worth knowing what has happened when it is said, because the thing people picture is not the thing the statute does.

The law in play is the Haryana Management of Civic Amenities and Infrastructure Deficient Municipal Areas (Special Provisions) Act, 2016 — Haryana Act 14 of 2016, which replaced an Act of the same name from 2013. Under it an area is notified as a declared area so that the municipality can go in and provide what is missing: water supply, sewerage, roads, street lighting. A 2021 amendment removed some earlier conditions, including a requirement about how much of the colony was already built on and a cut-off date.

The clearest statement of what this is comes from the Government's own side of the house. Answering in the Haryana Assembly, the position was put like this: rather than regularising unauthorised colonies, the Government declares them as deficient areas.

Figures given in the Assembly put the number of colonies declared within municipal limits in the hundreds, with a further set outside them. Faridabad is one district inside those totals, and its own numbers are a little further down this page.

Services and title are two questions

So here is the distinction this page exists to make, as plainly as we can put it.

People collapse these two questions into one because the word used in the street is “regularised”, and that word sounds like it covers everything. Tiles being laid in your lane is good news. It is not a document.

Why the Delhi position does not travel

A particular confusion is common here, and it comes from people reading something accurate about the wrong state.

Delhi passed a statute in 2019 whose title is the National Capital Territory of Delhi (Recognition of Property Rights of Residents in Unauthorised Colonies) Act, 2019. The words “recognition of property rights” are in the name of the Act. Somebody living in an unauthorised colony in Delhi was being offered something about ownership.

Haryana's 2016 Act is not that statute and does not use that language. What we found in it is about amenities and infrastructure in deficient areas.

The Faridabad figures, and what they are worth

Numbers get quoted in this district with more confidence than they deserve, so here they are with their provenance attached.

The Tribune reported in May 2023 that a survey by the town and country planning department had identified 418 unauthorised colonies in Faridabad, of which 181 met the criteria being applied for regularisation, and that 105 of those lay within Municipal Corporation limits. In January 2025 the same paper reported that work had begun in 72 colonies, at around a hundred and sixteen crore rupees, mostly for laying tiles in the streets, with a much larger requirement estimated beyond that.

Two honest caveats. The reports do not reconcile neatly with each other — the May 2023 headline and its own body give different figures, and the 2025 piece uses a total that we could not line up against the 2023 survey. And the criteria themselves, described as a minimum of about two acres with three-metre internal roads and a six-metre approach road, come from press reporting; we could not find an official document stating them, and reporting on the conditions has shifted over time.

Five checks before you pay anything

Every one of these can be done before money moves. Every one of them is cheap now.

A family that does these five things may still decide to buy. That is a perfectly respectable outcome — people buy with their eyes open all the time, at a price that reflects what they know. The disaster is not buying in such a colony. The disaster is buying without knowing you did.

Whether a bank will lend

This is where the question usually becomes concrete, because it is the point at which somebody outside the transaction looks at the papers.

The Reserve Bank of India issued a circular on housing finance in November 2006 containing this:

Two things about that quotation, and we would rather give you both than let you lean on it. It is twenty years old, and we could not confirm whether later instructions have modified or replaced it. And whatever the position in principle, every lender applies its own legal and technical appraisal, which is why two banks can reach different answers on the same plot.

The practical consequence does not depend on resolving any of that. Ask a lender early, and ask in writing. A declined file after you have paid is a problem. A declined enquiry before you pay is information. Our home loan documentation page sets out what a lender will want to see.

Whether a sale deed can be registered

We cannot answer this, and we are going to say so rather than fill the gap.

There have been reports, at particular times and for particular colonies, of registration being stopped. We did not find a State direction or a court order of general application that settles what happens across Faridabad, and we are not prepared to write “registration is refused” or “registration happens anyway” when neither is established.

What this means for you is narrower and more useful than a general rule would be: the position for your plot, in your tehsil, this month, is a thing somebody can establish, and it should be established before money moves rather than discovered at the sub-registrar's counter.

The no-objection requirement before registration

There is one more piece, which we mention because it catches agricultural and vacant land in particular.

The 1975 Act contains a provision requiring a no-objection certificate before registration in respect of certain land, and it was amended in 2020 — reporting at the time described changes to the area threshold and the kinds of land and transfer covered. We could not retrieve the text of that provision itself, so we are not going to set out its limits or its exemptions here.

If your transaction involves land of that kind, treat this as a question to put specifically: does this transfer need a no-objection certificate, and from whom? It has an answer, and it is better to have it before the appointment than at it.

FMDA and the municipal corporation

A small structural point that saves wasted trips.

Faridabad has a Faridabad Metropolitan Development Authority, created by an Act of 2018 which was enacted as Haryana Act 9 of 2019. It works at the level of planning, infrastructure, mobility, environment and urban renewal for the metropolitan area. The Municipal Corporation of Faridabad continues as the municipal body, and the Mayor sits on the Authority.

So there is more than one body in the picture, and for a resident chasing something — a road, a connection, a permission, a grievance — the first useful question is not what to write but whom to write to. Sending a well-drafted letter to the wrong body is a month gone.

If the dispute is with an employer

Faridabad is an industrial city and a large share of what comes out of it is employment. We are not going to rewrite that subject here, because it already has a long page of its own and the law is central law that applies in Faridabad exactly as it applies anywhere.

The thing to understand before anything else is that the forum follows what you are rather than what your designation says. The machinery available to a workman under industrial law is not the route open to somebody outside that definition, and the whole of it — the forty-five day notice, the three-year outer limit, conciliation and what it really is, a reference, the domestic enquiry, what reinstatement and back wages amount to in practice — is set out on our labour court page.

We have not printed a count of the labour courts sitting at Faridabad. Figures circulate; we could not verify one from the department, so it is not here.

The police here

Faridabad is policed by Haryana Police and has a Commissioner of Police. We are not giving you a date for when the commissionerate was created or a list of its divisions, because we could not confirm either from a source we would stand behind, and an out-of-date hierarchy is worse than none.

The statute is the same everywhere: the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. Section 173 governs the recording of information about a cognizable offence, Section 173(4) gives you a route to the Superintendent of Police where a station house officer refuses, and Section 175(3) is the Magistrate's power to order an investigation. Our FIR guide works through what to do at each refusal.

One thing that does cross the boundary: if something happened in Faridabad and you are in Delhi, information about a cognizable offence must still be recorded at whichever station you reach, and is then sent on to the one with jurisdiction. Reporting late in the “correct” place is how evidence is lost.

What people here are actually holding

Ask somebody in one of these colonies for their property papers and you will be handed a bundle. It is worth knowing what is in it, because the bundle is usually thicker than the title.

None of these is worthless. Each has its use, and in a long-running family arrangement they may be the only record of what everybody intended. The mistake is treating the pile as equivalent to the one document at the bottom of that list. Our family property guide goes through why the first five do not do the work of the sixth.

If you are assembling a file for an advocate, put them in date order and write a single page saying who paid whom, when, and in what form. That page is worth an hour of anybody's time and it is almost never there.

If a notice has come about your construction

These arrive, and the standard response is to show it to two neighbours, be told it is nothing, and put it away. That is the one response that reliably makes things worse.

The 1975 Act allows the Director or an authorised officer to call on somebody who has committed a breach to stop further construction and to show cause why restoration to the original state should not be ordered. A show cause notice is an invitation to answer. Not answering is itself an answer, and not a good one.

When the owner dies and the papers are already thin

Succession is difficult enough where title is clean. Where the underlying papers were never strong, a death turns a quiet uncertainty into an active dispute, and it does it at the worst moment for the family.

What typically happens is this. One person bought the plot, dealt with everybody, kept the file in his own cupboard and understood the arrangement. He dies. The heirs find an agreement to sell, a power of attorney in favour of somebody they have never met, three receipts and no registered deed. The person who could have explained it is the person who is gone.

The way through is unglamorous and it works. Establish who the heirs are. Agree, in writing, what each of them is taking, before anybody falls out. Then record it — a legal heir certificate where that is what is required, a relinquishment deed where somebody is standing aside, and mutation so the records stop naming a dead man. Where the siblings cannot agree, our family property guide sets out what a partition actually involves and why it takes longer than anybody expects.

Selling honestly in such a colony

A seller in this position has a choice to make early, and making it late is what turns a sale into a dispute.

Your buyer will find out. If he is borrowing, his bank will find out. If he has an advocate, the advocate will find out in the first hour. The only question is whether he learns it from you at the start, when it is a factor in the price, or from somebody else after he has paid an advance, when it is a reason to walk away and a reason to be angry.

Sellers worry that disclosure kills the sale. Sometimes it does, and in those cases the sale was going to die later and more expensively. More often it changes the price and the terms, which is what an honest market does. The sale deed and public notice pages set out the mechanics.

Whether your matter belongs in Faridabad

Courts are not chosen. A dispute carries its own forum with it, decided by a few connecting facts: where the thing complained of happened, where the land lies, where the opposite party lives or carries on business, and now and then a clause the parties agreed to.

For a plot or a house in Faridabad the second of those usually settles it, and settles it here. Employment turns on where the work was done. A contract can be less obvious and is worth asking about before drafting anything.

Your first day at Sector 12

The documents that keep coming up

Each of those pages shows its own price before you order, and nothing is payable in advance.

The five expensive assumptions

Where your actual matter lives

This page is about a city and a licence. Most readers arrive with something underneath that, and it has its own page.

When money is the obstacle

A good many people who ought to be in court never get there, and the reason is the fee rather than the facts. There is a statutory answer that is badly publicised. The State provides advocates without charge to people who fall inside defined categories, those categories are broader than most readers assume, and the way in is the legal services authority rather than any private office. It operates in Haryana as it does everywhere. Who qualifies and how to ask is set out on our page about whether you need a lawyer — five minutes there is worth spending before concluding that you have no options.

Two other routes deserve a mention. Lok Adalat settles compromisable matters by consent and what it passes is final between the parties. Mediation through court-annexed centres is often the quickest honest exit from a dispute that has stopped moving, and family and commercial matters are where it earns its keep.

Our part, and its edges

Since this page spends a lot of words telling you what to check, it should be exact about who we are. Legal Space Services does not argue cases and is not permitted to. We are a documentation and coordination company. Papers get drafted, executed, registered and attested; a file gets kept in order; and people get put in front of advocates whom they engage themselves.

In Faridabad that tends to mean three things. The documents a transaction or a dispute needs, priced on their own pages and paid for afterwards. A straight answer about which forum the matter looks like it belongs to, including when the answer is that you do not need us for it. And, where an advocate is wanted, the matter sent out once to the whole directory rather than to a single inbox, so the first one free takes it and calls you.

Lines we do not cross

There is a sixth, and this page is largely built out of it. Four times above we have written that we could not confirm something — the current text of a penalty provision, the official criteria, the status of a 2006 circular, what happens at the registration counter. Each of those gaps could have been filled with a confident sentence and nobody would have known. The reader who acted on it would have found out eventually, which is the only audit that matters.

What we charge

For the asking, nothing. Using the directory, reading this and sending a matter through to the advocates on it are free, and no money moves between us and them in either direction, which is why nobody on that list can buy a better place on it. For work we do ourselves, the price is on the document's own page, we confirm the whole figure on a call before starting, and payment comes after the work. What your advocate charges is between you and them.

Questions people ask