Indian Land Unit Converter

A bigha is not an area

It is a word that means different areas in different places, and the range is not small. Across the states that use it, a bigha varies by a factor of four.

Two things stand out. A bigha in Bihar is four times a bigha in Uttarakhand — so “ten bigha” describes six acres in one place and one and a half in the other. And Rajasthan has two of them: a pucca bigha of 27,225 square feet and a kaccha one of 17,424, both current, in the same state.

The katha and the biswa inherit the problem, because both are usually defined as a twentieth of a bigha. A katha is 720 square feet in West Bengal and 2,880 in Assam — fourfold on its own — and 600 in Madhya Pradesh, which stretches the full range to nearly five.

Which units are actually fixed

Not every traditional unit is variable, and it is worth knowing which is which. A good number of them are defined as exact fractions of an acre, and those convert perfectly everywhere.

The pattern is that the units defined against the acre survived colonial standardisation with a fixed value, while the ones that predate it — bigha, katha, biswa — kept their regional meanings. So a cent is a hundredth of an acre in Kerala and in Tamil Nadu and everywhere else, and a bigha is not.

The names still overlap confusingly. Punjab uses marla and kanal, which are fixed, and bigha and biswa, which are not — in the same land records.

Why this tool refuses to guess

Ask the calculator above for a bigha and it will not answer until you tell it which state. That is deliberate, and it is the reason this page exists separately from the site’s general area converter.

The general converter carries only units with a single settled definition, and omits the bigha entirely rather than picking a value and presenting it as national. That is the right call for a tool that cannot ask. But it leaves the most commonly searched Indian land unit unserved — so this page carries it, and handles the problem by asking instead.

The alternative — quoting one number and calling it “the” bigha — is what most conversion sites do, and it is how someone ends up believing a plot is four times the size it is. A refusal is a worse experience and a better answer.

When you do supply a state, the tool also shows what the same figure would mean in every other state that uses the unit. Seeing the spread laid out is usually more useful than the single conversion, because it tells you how much rests on having the state right.

Reading a property listing

A listing normally quotes an area, and the area is frequently the least trustworthy number in it. Three things are worth separating.

The unit. If it is bigha, katha or biswa, the figure is meaningless without knowing the local convention — and the local convention is the district’s, not necessarily the state’s. If it is cent, guntha, marla or gaj, the number is unambiguous.

Which area. For built property, carpet, built-up and super built-up areas are three different quantities and can differ by 30% or more between the first and the last. RERA requires carpet area to be stated, and it is the only one of the three with a legal definition — a listing quoting super built-up area is describing something that includes a share of the corridors.

Recorded against measured. The area in the land record and the area you would get by measuring the boundary are often not the same, sometimes by a substantial margin, because many records descend from surveys conducted a long time ago. The record governs the title; the measurement governs what you can build.

The practical habit: convert everything to square feet or square metres before comparing two listings, and ask which area is being quoted. Two plots described in different units and different area conventions cannot be compared at all until both are normalised.

What the land record says

India’s legal units for land are the square metre and the hectare. Land records maintained under the state revenue departments will generally state area in those, whatever unit the transaction is discussed in.

Which gives a useful rule for anything that matters: work from the record. The khasra or survey number identifies the plot, the khatauni or record of rights names who holds it, and the recorded area is the one a registrar, a tax assessment and a court will use. A figure in bigha quoted in conversation is a translation of that, and translations lose things.

Most states now publish records online — Bhulekh in Uttar Pradesh, Mahabhulekh in Maharashtra, Bhoomi in Karnataka, Banglarbhumi in West Bengal and their equivalents elsewhere — so the recorded area is usually a search away, and it is worth checking before rather than after.

This page will tell you what a bigha means in a given state. It cannot tell you what a particular plot is, and no converter can. For a purchase, a boundary question or a tax matter, the documents decide it.

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Sources and methodology

The fixed units need no interpretation: a cent is a hundredth of an acre and a kanal is twenty marla, so those are derived from the exact 43,560-square-foot acre and carry no error. The variable ones are the opposite case. There is no national authority that defines a bigha, because land measurement is maintained at state level — the figures here are the conventions in general use, and the state land record is the authority for any particular piece of ground.

• Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme — state land records and measurement practiceDepartment of Land Resources, Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India · verified 2026-09-07 · That land measurement units are maintained at state level and that traditional units such as the bigha differ between states, which is why no national conversion factor exists for them
• The Standards of Weights and Measures Act and India’s adoption of the metric systemDepartment of Consumer Affairs, Legal Metrology Division, Government of India · verified 2026-09-07 · That the square metre and hectare are the legal units for land in India, and that traditional units survive as local practice rather than as legal measures
• NIST Handbook 44, Appendix C — the international foot and the definition of the acreNational Institute of Standards and Technology, US · verified 2026-09-07 · The exact 0.3048 m foot and the 43,560 square foot acre, from which every fixed unit on this page — cent, guntha, marla, kanal — is derived as an exact fraction