Section 90A, and Why "90B" Is Not What You Think

Ask around Jodhpur about converting agricultural land and you will hear "90A and 90B" spoken of as two routes you can choose between. That is not what the law says. One of those sections has been deleted from the Act, and understanding why matters if you are buying land whose title chain includes an old 90B order.

The correction first

Section 90B has been deleted from the Rajasthan Land Revenue Act, 1956. The official updated text of the Act carries the entry "[90B: deleted]". Section 90A is the live provision, and the only one under which agricultural land is converted today.

The Rajasthan High Court put the position plainly in Bhanwar Singh v. State of Rajasthan (11 February 2022), referring to the Government's authority "in terms of Section 90B of the Act of 1956 as it stood at the relevant time and Section 90-A as it stands today". Past tense for one, present for the other.

There is a further wrinkle. Section 90B was never a conversion provision to begin with. Its marginal note read "Termination of rights and resumption of land in certain cases", and it dealt with land in urbanisable limits or the peripheral belt of an urban area — the Collector would terminate agricultural tenancy rights so the land could pass to urban use and be regularised or allotted to the occupant. Useful, but a different thing entirely from conversion.

What Section 90A requires

Section 90A(1) is short and absolute: no person holding land for agriculture may use it for any other purpose except with the written permission of the State Government. That power is delegated down to revenue officers by the rules made under the section.

The consequence of ignoring it is set out in Section 90A(5), and it is severe. A person using agricultural land for a non-agricultural purpose without permission "shall be deemed to be trespasser ... and shall be liable to ejectment", or alternatively liable to a prescribed fine. Read that again: having paid good money for the land, the occupant's legal status becomes that of a trespasser.

Section 90A(9) provides an appeal within 30 days, to be disposed of within 60.

Who sanctions what

Under the Rajasthan Land Revenue (Conversion of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes, in rural areas) Rules, 2007, the sanctioning authority depends on the purpose and the area:

This table is also the single most useful genuineness test available to a buyer, and we come back to it below.

What conversion costs

Rule 7 sets charges as the higher of a flat rate per square metre or a percentage of the DLC rate — the District Level Committee, or circle, rate for the area.

Because the charge is DLC-linked, the actual rupee figure depends on the current circle rate for that specific zone. You can look the DLC rate up yourself at mobileepanjiyan.rajasthan.gov.in, which lists both Jodhpur and Jodhpur-Rural. We are not going to publish a rupee figure for "a Jodhpur conversion" because no such single figure exists.

Timelines — and the deemed-approval myth

Rule 9(3) requires authorities up to Collector rank to decide within 90 days of a complete application. Rule 9A provides a Tatkal route at 15 working days. If the deadline is missed, Rule 9(5) escalates the file upward — to the Collector if the SDO has overrun, to the Divisional Commissioner if the Collector has.

Escalation is not approval. There is no general deemed-conversion provision for residential land, however long the authority takes. The only deemed-approval clause we could find in the 2007 Rules is Rule 9(8), which applies solely to tourism units at 45 days. A number of property blogs state otherwise. They are wrong, and it is an expensive thing to be wrong about.

What changed in 2026

An amendment to the rural conversion rules was notified on 29 April 2026. The change most relevant to ordinary buyers is that the residential-unit threshold was lowered from 4,000 sq m to 1,000 sq m. The amendment also introduced a definition of renewable energy projects with concessional charges at 10 per cent of industrial rates, imposed restrictions on petrol-pump conversions near schools, hospitals and water bodies, and revised application fees and forms.

One honest caveat: we have this from regulatory tracking services rather than from the gazette itself, which we could not retrieve. Confirm against the notification before relying on it.

A second caveat worth stating. Conversion inside an urban development authority's jurisdiction appears to run under separate 1981 urban rules, under which the authority must first give a recommendation on land-use conformity. We could not confirm from an official source whether those rules remain in force or exactly how a file routes through JDA today. If your land sits inside JDA's notified region, ask at the authority rather than assuming the rural procedure applies.

If someone has already built on unconverted land

Regularisation is possible but it is discretionary, it costs money, and it has limits. In Bhanwar Singh, the High Court confirmed the Government has authority under Section 90A to regularise unauthorised conversions — while refusing regularisation of encroachments on reserved facility areas: parks, playgrounds, public land, forest and river areas. Section 49(1) of the JDA Act similarly permits regularisation on prescribed terms but expressly excludes land earmarked for public utilities.

So a seller's assurance that "it will be regularised later" is not a legal position. On a plot carved out of a park reservation or a water body, it is not even a possibility.

How to verify a conversion order is genuine

1. Check the signing officer against the jurisdiction table. A residential-colony conversion of 40,000 sq m signed by a Tehsildar, whose limit is 2,500 sq m for a residential unit, is void on its face. This is the strongest single test and it takes two minutes.
2. Check the jamabandi. Pull the current record on Apna Khata or e-Dharti. If the land still reads as agricultural, the order has not taken effect on the record, whatever the paper in front of you says.
3. Check the charge paid. Compare the challan against the Rule 7 computation at the current DLC rate. A payment far below it is a red flag.
4. File an RTI with the sanctioning office to confirm the order number exists on their file.

There is no online portal where a 90A order number can be authenticated. We looked. Anyone implying otherwise has not.