Land area converter — bigha, katha, guntha and cent, by state

Why a bigha is different in every state

A bigha was never a fixed area. It was the square of whatever measuring chain or rod a region used, so its size followed the chain. Rajasthan’s own Land Records Rules put it in one line: “One chain x One chain is equal to one Bigha.” A 165-foot chain gives the pucca bigha of 27,225 sq ft; a 132-foot chain gives the kachcha bigha of 17,424 sq ft. Punjab and Haryana counted in karams of 57.157 inches, which is why their bigha is 9,075 sq ft.

That is also why the figures online disagree. Lenders and property portals variously publish 27,000, 27,225 and 27,255 sq ft for the UP bigha, and repeat “1 hectare = 3.987 bigha”, which implies a bigha of 26,997.52 sq ft — a figure no government source uses. The table below is built only from Rules, revenue manuals and judgments. Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh are missing on purpose: no government or court source for their bigha could be found.

Bigha, biswa, katha, dhur — the northern chain

North and east of the Vindhyas, an area is written as a chain of units, largest first, each a fixed fraction of the one above. A UP record written “1-17-0” means 1 bigha, 17 biswa, 0 biswansi. The chain is what makes a record readable; the sizes are what change from state to state.

Two traps. The Bihar katha (1,361.25 sq ft) is not the West Bengal katha (720 sq ft), and Jharkhand — carved out of Bihar — uses 720 sq ft on the Department of Land Records’ own table, not Bihar’s figure. And the dhur, the twentieth of a Bihar katha, has no government source at all, so it is not converted here.

Guntha, cent, decimal, ground — the southern and eastern units

The south and east mostly count in fractions of an acre, so these units do not drift from state to state the way the bigha does. A cent (Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh) and a decimal (Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand) are both 1/100 acre. A guntha (Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, Telangana) is 1/40 acre.

The unit to watch is the are. Maharashtra’s 7/12 records hectare-are, and an are (100 m²) is 1,076.39 sq ft — about 1.2% smaller than a guntha. A 7/12 showing 0.40 is 40 are, which is 39.5369 guntha, not 40. The Chennai ground (2,400 sq ft by custom) and the Andhra ankanam are used in property deals, but no government source fixes either, so they are not converted.

How to read the area on your khatauni / RoR

Start from the record, not from a bigha. The area column of a Record of Rights is almost always in a unit that does not vary — hectares or acres — so it is the one figure you can trust. Convert that, then compare it with what the seller or neighbour calls the land in bigha or katha.

1. 1Find the area column and note the unit printed in its heading.
2. 2Choose your state above, set “From” to that unit and enter the figure exactly as printed.
3. 3Read the result in the unit people around you use, then check the “written the local way” line.
4. 4If it disagrees with what you were told by more than a rounding margin, go back to the record — not to the seller’s figure.

Which unit the government actually records (hectares on most RoRs)

Most states moved their records to metric or acre units decades ago, and the Department of Land Resources’ Glossary of Revenue Terms (2025) confirms the unit field state by state. The local unit survives in conversation and in old settlement records, not on the current record.

Converting for a sale deed — which figure goes in the document

Section 21 of the Registration Act, 1908 requires a document about land to describe it “sufficient to identify the same”. In practice that means the survey, khasra or plot number and the area as the record states it. Copy the area exactly as the Record of Rights prints it — hectares on a UP khatauni, acres and decimals on an Odisha RoR — and put a local-unit equivalent after it in brackets if the parties want one.

Do not round, and do not convert the record’s figure into a bigha and then back. A half-bigha rounding in UP is 13,612.5 sq ft. When the deed and the record disagree, mutation stalls until someone reconciles them, and the record’s figure is the one the tehsil will use.

How the converter works — three worked examples