Whether you may buy the field at all

01The rule that surprises most buyers

Section 63 makes a sale, gift, exchange, lease or mortgage of agricultural land INVALID in favour of a person who is not an agriculturist. A non-agriculturist buyer must get the Collector's prior permission or the transaction is void.

Read that again, because it is stronger than it looks. It does not say the sale is penalised or that it can be regularised later. It says the sale is not valid. A person who is not already a farmer, buying agricultural land in Gujarat without the Collector's prior permission, has bought nothing.

Almost every plot in the twenty two villages of this region is agricultural land. That makes this the first question a buyer here has to answer, before any question about price or duty.

02The industrial route most Dholera buyers use

Lets a non-agriculturist buy agricultural land for a bona fide industrial purpose without a section 63 permission, provided the statutory conditions are met, and gets the Collector's certificate that validates the purchase. This is the route most industrial buyers in and around Dholera use.

Section 63AA lets somebody who is not a farmer buy agricultural land for a genuine industrial purpose without going through the section 63 permission first, provided the conditions are met. The buyer then has thirty days from the purchase to send notice to the Collector, with a copy to the Mamlatdar, and must start producing goods or providing services within five years of the certificate.

Two of the conditions bite hard on land buying. The area bought cannot exceed four times the area on which construction for the industrial purpose is proposed, and where the area exceeds ten hectares the previous permission of the Industries Commissioner is required.

The penalty. No application fee is stated. A PENALTY is stated: failure to send the notice within 30 days makes the purchaser liable, in addition to the non-agricultural assessment, to a fine not exceeding two thousand rupees as the Collector may direct.

And if the Collector refuses the certificate, the sale is treated as a contravention of section 63, which means void.

03All four permissions, priced

Four separate permissions can stand between a buyer and a field. None of them has a published application fee, and one of them carries a penalty instead.

No application fee is published for any of the four. The premium under section 43 is fixed case by case by the Collector and the Revenue Department subject page links only a bundle of circulars from 1947 to 2008 rather than a rate. No percentage is asserted anywhere on this site.

The fourth one is easy to miss and expensive to miss. Where the seller belongs to a Scheduled Tribe, land cannot be sold without permission under section 73AA, and the industrial route in section 63AA is expressly made subject to it. A buyer who relies on the industrial route without checking who the seller is has not solved the problem.

Record GJ-PERM-02. Source: gujact_19092023.pdf pp.76-77: conditions (a) land not within an urban agglomeration as defined in the Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act 1976; (b) previous permission of the Industries Commissioner where area exceeds ten hectares; (c) area sold shall not exceed four times the area on which construction for a bona fide industrial purpose is proposed; (d) section 73AA applies where the seller belongs to a Scheduled Tribe. Sub-section (3)(a) thirty-day notice; (3)(b) fine not exceeding two thousand rupees; (4)(b) five-year production deadline.. Statutory basis: Section 63AA, The Gujarat Tenancy and Agricultural Lands Act, 1948. Data class OFFICIAL. Last verified: 4 August 2026.