India · Lexicon
The terrain, in its own words.
A practice that translates a market must first speak it. This is the working vocabulary of Indian development as we use it in files: not exhaustive, and not neutral. Where a word hides a risk, the definition says so. Your committee can read a term sheet against this page and know what it is actually being told.
01 · Entry and exchange control
The rulebook's words
The words that decide whether capital moves.
- Automatic route
Investment that proceeds without prior government approval. Construction development carries it in full, which is why structure, not permission, is the real entry question.
- Lock-in, per tranche
The three-year hold on foreign capital, counted from each tranche's date rather than from first close. A funding schedule is therefore also a calendar of differently dated locks. Model it as one.
- Trunk infrastructure
Roads, water supply, street lighting, drainage and sewerage. The completed set is one of the two gates through which early exit is lawful, and it is evidenced, not asserted.
- Developed plots
Plots where trunk infrastructure exists. The only kind a foreign-funded structure may sell as land.
- Real estate business
The prohibited category: dealing in land and property to profit from the dealing itself. Development is outside it. Rent on leased assets is expressly outside it. Buying land to sell land is inside it, and structures drift there by accident more often than by design.
- Downstream investment
An Indian company investing into another Indian entity. Once the investor company is foreign owned or controlled, its downstream money carries the foreign conditions with it. Ownership launders nothing.
- Foreign owned or controlled company
An Indian company with majority foreign beneficial ownership, or a foreign right to appoint most of its board. The status that switches the downstream rules on.
- Pricing guidelines
The fair-value discipline on entries and exits between residents and non-residents, certified under a recognised methodology. The certificate belongs in the file.
- Investment vehicle
The regulated fund category whose downstream investment counts as domestic when its sponsor and manager are Indian owned and controlled. One definition carries most of the institutional market's structuring.
02 · Land and title
The ground's words
The words that decide what is actually owned.
- Mother deed
The root conveyance a chain of title descends from. Diligence walks forward from it, thirty years back at minimum, because every later deed inherits its defects.
- Encumbrance certificate
The registrar's statement of registered transactions against a property for a stated period. It shows what was registered. It does not show what was never registered, which is why it opens diligence rather than closing it.
- Mutation
The revenue record catching up with a transfer. Registration without mutation is a deed the land records have not heard about, and the gap is where disputes breed.
- 7/12 extract · khata · patta
The revenue record under its state names: the 7/12 extract in Maharashtra, the khata in Karnataka, the patta in Tamil Nadu. Different documents, one function: who holds, what tenure, which crops, whose charge. Reading them in the local form is the price of admission.
- Tenure conversion
The state permission that turns agricultural land into land that may be built on. Discretionary, state-specific, and the single most common silent assumption in a foreign underwriting.
- Encroachment
Occupation the paper does not admit. Found by walking boundaries against the survey sketch, not by reading. Possession is a fact with feet.
- Joint development agreement
Land contributed against a share of built area or revenue. Capital-efficient, dominant, and a dispute machine wherever the share definitions, sanction risk and cost escalation are left loose.
- Development management agreement
Delivery discipline and brand brought to a holder's project for fee and share, with the land staying where it is. The asset-light structure institutional residential increasingly runs on.
03 · Consents and delivery
The programme's words
The words that decide when, and how tall.
- Change of land use
The planning permission that re-purposes a parcel. Often the first consent in the chain and the one everything serial hangs from.
- Commencement certificate
The authority's permission to start building, issued against the sanctioned plan. Building past its conditions is how occupation certificates get lost years later.
- Prior environmental clearance
The clearance that must exist before land is prepared, where thresholds trigger it. Prior is the operative word: the retrospective route is now closed but for a narrow, supervised exception, and we treat assets that used it as carrying a live question.
- Fire consent
The fire authority's approval, provisional at design and final at completion. The market calls it the fire NOC. Whatever it is called on the day, it is a completion gate.
- Occupation certificate
The statutory permission to occupy. Without it a building is inventory, not an asset: lawful use, tax treatment and lenders' completion tests all turn on it, and late occupation certificates usually trace to an unresolved deviation from the sanctioned plan.
- Floor space index
The ratio of buildable area to plot, and the whole economics of a site. Base entitlement, premium purchases and transferable rights stack into the true number, which is municipal, changeable, and never assumed in our appraisals.
- Transferable development rights
Buildable area detached from one parcel and loaded onto another. A legitimate development input, and a prohibited trading asset for foreign capital. The line between those two sentences is a structuring decision.
- Development charges
The state and municipal levies on the grant of development rights. Materially different between states, revised without much ceremony, and a line an appraisal carries explicitly.
04 · Regulation and reporting
The committee's words
The words that decide what the capital is told.
- Project registration
The delivery regulator's gate on marketing and sale, registered per project and per phase. Its public register is counterparty diligence for free, and we read it before any developer's own deck.
- Separate project account
The statutory escrow into which the defined share of buyer collections must flow, released against certified progress. The discipline that ended the era of one project funding another, where it is honoured. The register shows where it is not.
- Abeyance
The regulator's public holding state for projects that lapsed or stopped filing. A counterparty's abeyance history is a character reference, published.
- Initial report
The monitor's opening due-diligence report, fit to stand as a condition precedent of the facility. The document a lender reads before the first rupee moves.
- Drawdown certificate
One page, gross and net, in figures and in words, above a signature that binds the certifier. The calculation lives behind it, and so does the evidence.
- Cost to complete
The only number that matters monthly: what it now takes to finish, held against what remains available. Everything else in a report is context for this line.
- Exception report
The note that does not wait for month end. Fact, exposure, options, recommendation, inside a defined clock. The difference between an adviser and a reporting service.
- Loan to value · loan to cost · peak spend
The three funding controls a facility runs on: debt against completed value, debt against total cost, and the cash ceiling on the worst day. A monitor confirms all three every cycle, or it is not monitoring.
Words are cheap to publish and expensive to misuse. Hold ours against our files.
Enquiries
The practice answers.
128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX
The development practice is led by Tanishq Chauhan. Correspondence reaches the principal directly.
Tanishq Chauhan on LinkedIn, opens in a new tab
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