Someone selling a plot on the edge of Hyderabad will tell you it is “in the HMDA master plan, residential zone”. It sounds like a fact you could verify in a minute. Then you go looking for the map, and the simple picture falls apart.
There is no single HMDA master plan. There are five, they cover different parts of the region, and the one everybody names in conversation is itself published as thirty separate sheets. Checking the wrong one does not return an error. It returns a confident answer about somebody else’s land.
Five plans, not one
HMDA’s own Master Plan page lists these:
| Plan | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Master Plan 2031 | Published as 30 mandal-wise sheets across the metropolitan region |
| Master plan Zone Wise Segments, HUDA Area | The erstwhile Hyderabad Urban Development Authority area, by zone segment |
| Master Plan HADA | The erstwhile Hyderabad Airport Development Authority area |
| Master plan CDA | The erstwhile Cyberabad Development Authority area |
| Revised Development Plan (Master Plan) of erstwhile Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad Area | What HMDA calls the core area |
These are not versions of one another and the later ones do not simply supersede the earlier ones. They are the accumulated planning inheritance of a city that absorbed several development authorities. HUDA, HADA and CDA were separate bodies with separate plans before HMDA was constituted, and their plans continue to govern the areas they were drawn for.
The practical consequence is unglamorous but decisive. Before you can answer “what is this land zoned as”, you have to answer “which plan is this land in”. Most people skip the second question because they do not know it exists.
The 2031 plan is thirty maps
The plan people mean when they say “HMDA master plan 2031” is not a map. It is an index of thirty mandal-wise sheets, each opened separately:
Bibinagar, Bommalaramaram, Buvanagiri, Chevella, Choutuppal, Faruqnagar, Ghatkesar, Hatnura, Hayathnagar, Ibrahimpatnam Manchal, Jinnawaram, Kandukur, Kisara, Kothuru, Maheshwaram, Medchal Qutubullapur, Moinabad Rajendranagar, Mulug, Narsapur, Patancheruvu, Pochampalli, Sangareddy, Shahbad, Shahmirpet, Shamshabad, Shankarpalli Ramchandrapuram, Shivampet, Tupran, Wargal and Yacharam.
Note what the list is organised by. Not district, not municipality, and not pin code. Mandal. If you know your property by its locality name or by the name a marketing brochure gave the venture, you will have to work back to the mandal before the index is any use to you. The revenue village and mandal on your pattadar passbook or sale deed are what you need, and those are also what the Bhu Bharati land record shows.
A plot near a mandal boundary deserves particular care. Opening the neighbouring sheet because it loaded first is one of the easier ways to reach a wrong and confident conclusion.
The region got much bigger in March 2025
This is the part where most published guidance is out of date, including guidance that reads as though it were written last week.
HMDA was formed by G.O.Ms.No.570 MA&UD (I1) Department dated 25 August 2008, in the then combined state of Andhra Pradesh, with an area of 7,257 sq km. That is the figure a great deal of secondary writing still repeats, and some repeats an even older 5,965 sq km.
The Government then issued G.O. Ms. No. 68 MA&UD dated 12 March 2025, extending the boundaries of the Hyderabad Metropolitan Region up to the Regional Ring Road and covering a buffer area of up to two kilometres. On HMDA’s own numbers the region now covers 1,355 revenue villages from 104 mandals across eleven districts, an area of about 10,472.723 sq km.
That is roughly a 44 per cent increase in area over the 2008 figure, and it happened eighteen months ago.
For a landowner the implication is direct. Land that sat outside HMDA jurisdiction until March 2025 may sit inside it now. Planning permissions, layout rules and the applicable authority can all change with that boundary, and the change does not announce itself on your documents. If your land is in one of the outer mandals towards the Regional Ring Road, the question “is this HMDA land” has a different answer today than it had two years ago.
Permissions have moved to TG-bPASS
Alongside the boundary change, the route for applying has shifted. HMDA states that for land within Grampanchayat limits under HMDA jurisdiction, all types of building permissions, occupancy certificates, layout permissions and group housing permissions are now processed exclusively through TG-bPASS, and that new applications other than change of land use will not be entertained in DPMS any further.
Change of land use is the carve-out. It stays on the older route while everything else moves.
This matters when you are handed paperwork. An application receipt from the wrong system, or an assurance that “it has been applied for” without saying where, is not evidence of anything much. Ask which system, and ask for the acknowledgement.
The Regional Ring Road alignment is notified
HMDA has notified the proposed alignment of the 100 metre wide Regional Ring Road in the Hyderabad Metropolitan Region, and publishes it on the same Master Plan page as the plans.
Read the word “proposed” carefully, in both directions. A proposed alignment is not a completed acquisition, so a plot near it has not necessarily been taken. Equally, it is not noise. It is the state publishing where it currently intends to put a hundred metre wide road. If that intention crosses your survey number, you want to know before you buy rather than after.
The honest position on a proposed alignment is that it is a reason to check the notification against the specific survey number and to price the uncertainty, not a reason to panic or to dismiss.
What zoning does and does not settle
A great deal of misplaced confidence attaches to the word “residential”.
Zoning records the land use the plan contemplates for a parcel. That is genuinely useful. It is also narrow. Zoning does not grant you permission to build, does not prove who owns the land, does not clear an encumbrance, and does not override a separate prohibition on registration.
Four checks sit outside the master plan entirely and each can stop a transaction on its own:
- Registration prohibition. A survey number can appear in a prohibited register regardless of how it is zoned. That is a separate question with a separate answer, covered in the Section 22A prohibited property guide.
- Lake and buffer restrictions. Full tank level and buffer zone constraints bind irrespective of the zoning shown, and are worth checking before buying in Hyderabad.
- Layout approval. Whether the layout your plot sits in was actually approved is its own enquiry, and the method differs by authority. The guide on checking layout approval validity sets out the routes.
- Regularisation status. An unapproved plot may have an LRS application behind it, and an application is not an approval. What the receipt does and does not prove is covered in the Telangana LRS guide.
A plot can be residential in the master plan and still be unbuildable in practice. The plan is one layer of a stack, and it is not the layer that most often goes wrong.
Working out which plan applies, in order
- Get the revenue village and mandal from the pattadar passbook, sale deed, or land record. Not the locality name, and not the venture name.
- Establish whether the land is in the core area, HUDA, HADA or CDA geography, or in the wider 2031 metropolitan area. The core area and the three erstwhile authority areas have their own plans.
- If it is in the 2031 area, open the sheet for that specific mandal. Do not settle for a neighbouring sheet.
- Check the March 2025 extension if the land sits towards the Regional Ring Road. Jurisdiction may be newer than your documents.
- Check the proposed RRR alignment separately against the survey number.
- Then run the four checks above, because none of them is answered by the plan.
If your survey number does not appear where you expect it, that is a recognised situation with its own diagnosis rather than evidence that the land has vanished. The guide on a survey number missing from the Telangana master plan works through the usual causes.
The practical rule
Treat “it is in the HMDA master plan” as the beginning of a question rather than the end of one. Ask which plan, which sheet, which mandal, and as of which notification. A seller who can answer those four has probably done the work. A seller who cannot may simply be repeating what they were told.
The maps are public and free. The cost of checking the right one is an hour. The cost of checking the wrong one is discovered later, usually by someone holding a sale deed and a demolition notice at the same time.
Assetly helps property owners keep the records behind these checks in one place, so the mandal, survey number and permission trail are to hand when a question like this comes up.
