One country, three layers of units
Indian land measurement is a stack of three systems that never fully replaced each other. At the bottom are traditional regional units — bigha, guntha, cent, gaj — defined locally, centuries old, and still the language of everyday deals. Above them sit the British-era imperial units — the acre and the square foot — introduced through colonial surveys and still standard in real-estate listings. On top is the metric system — hectares and square meters — which is what official digitized records use today. Any given plot can legitimately be described in all three at once, and a confident buyer or heir needs to move between them without losing area in the translation.
The north and east: bigha country
From Punjab across the Gangetic plain to Bengal and Assam, the workhorse unit is thebigha — with the crucial caveat that its size changes at nearly every state border. Assam and West Bengal use 14,400 sq ft (1,600 gaj); Bihar and UP use figures around 27,000-27,220 sq ft; Rajasthan distinguishes a pucca bigha (27,225 sq ft) from a kachha one (17,424 sq ft); hill states shrink it — 8,712 sq ft in Himachal, about 6,804 sq ft in Uttarakhand.
The bigha's sub-units follow the same local logic. North Indian records divide it into 20biswa, each of 20 biswansi. Bengal divides it into 20kattha (cottah) of 720 sq ft, each of 16 chatak (45 sq ft) — units you will still see in every Kolkata apartment-plot listing. Bihar's kattha is roughly double Bengal's at about 1,361 sq ft, subdivided into 20 dhur. When an old family document mentions "kattha", the state name next to it is doing most of the work.
The west and south: acre fractions
Western and southern India standardized earlier around units defined as exact fractions of the acre, which makes them far better behaved. Theguntha (or gunta) of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh is exactly 1/40 acre — 1,089 sq ft, a 33-foot square. Thecent of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and coastal Karnataka is exactly 1/100 acre — 435.6 sq ft. Because both nest perfectly inside the acre, records like "2 acre 15 guntha" or "1.25 acre = 125 cents" convert without any regional lookup.
Two city-specific units are worth knowing: Chennai's ground (2,400 sq ft), common in older city listings, and the north's gaj (square yard, 9 sq ft), the standard plot unit in Delhi NCR — a "200 gaj kothi" is a house on 1,800 sq ft of land.
The metric layer: what the record office sees
Every state's digitized land records program stores areas in metric — hectares for agricultural land, square meters for urban plots. Maharashtra's 7/12 extract shows hectare-are (1 are = 100 m² ≈ 1 guntha), Karnataka's RTC shows acre-guntha alongside metric, and the Hindi-belt khasra records increasingly show hectares. The key metric bridges: 1 hectare = 2.4711 acres = 10,000 m², and 1 acre = 4,046.86 m². If a record and a listing disagree, converting both to square feet with the correct local factors is the fastest way to see whether it is a unit mismatch or a genuine discrepancy.
Reading a record without getting burned
- Identify the unit and the state together. "Bigha" or "kattha" without a state is not a number.
- Convert everything to square feet (or square meters) before comparing documents, listings, and quotes.
- Watch for pucca/kachha ambiguity in Rajasthan, Punjab, and older UP documents.
- Trust the metric figure on the official record over a traditional figure in a listing when they conflict — then find out why they differ.
- For any legal or financial step, verify area with the district revenue office or a licensed surveyor; published conversion figures are conventions, not law.