What the old village core costs to register

01What gamtal actually is

Gamtal is the old built-up core of a village: the houses, the lanes, the shops along them. It is the part of a village that was already built when the revenue records were drawn, as distinct from the fields around it.

It matters for three reasons. It has its own rate in the price list, so land there is valued differently from the fields. It does not need conversion to be built on, because it is already village site land. And it is expressly excluded from the industrial township declaration that governs the rest of the region, which means the village core stays under its Village Panchayat while everything around it does not.

Twenty one of the twenty two villages carry a rate for their old built-up core. It is the most widely published rate in the region, more widely than farmland and far more widely than converted building land.

02Commercial frontage inside the village

Every village that publishes a core rate publishes two: one for residential and a higher one for commercial. The commercial rate is the shop frontage on the village lane, and in some villages it is more than double the residential rate a few metres behind it.

This is the one place in the whole rate book where the difference between two uses of the same land is consistently large, and it is a reasonable reflection of how a village actually works.

03The one village with nothing

Sodhi has no page anywhere in the built-land volume and no page in the farmland volume either, so it carries no rate of any kind. It is the only village in the region in that position, and the reason is documented on the missing rates page.