Land Area Converter

A sale deed gives the plot in square feet, the jamabandi in kanals and marlas, and the family talks in bighas. The three rarely line up, because India never fixed one size for these units. Below is the officially documented size of each unit, the document behind it, and where no official figure exists.

Why the same word means different areas

Old land units start from a measuring rod: the karam or gatha, in inches, in Punjab, Haryana and Himachal, and the jarib, in feet, in Rajasthan. Each area unit is a count of the rod squared.

So bigha (m²) = 400 × (gatha in inches × 0.0254)² and kanal (m²) = 180 × (karam in inches × 0.0254)². Change the rod and every unit built on it changes with the square of the rod. A 99-inch gatha makes a bigha of 27,225 sq ft and a 54-inch karam one of 8,100 sq ft. Both are called a bigha; the first is 3.36 times the second.

The rod changes by district. Himachal's Land Records Manual gives 54 inches for Kinnaur and Bilaspur, 56 for Mandi, Kullu, Chamba and Lahaul-Spiti and 57.157 for Sirmaur, while Shimla, Solan, Una, Kangra and Hamirpur each use two or three lengths. NIC's registration gap analysis says Himachal's bigha factor has to be stored per revenue village.

The standard units are exact

Acres, hectares, square yards and square feet are fixed by definition. These figures are from NIST Handbook 44 (2023), on the international foot of exactly 0.3048 m.

The US survey foot, deprecated from 1 January 2023, gave an acre about 0.016 m² larger. Every conversion here passes through these exact figures, so any uncertainty sits in the local unit's size, never in the acre or the hectare.

Punjab, Haryana and Himachal: the karam decides

The Punjab Land Records Manual, para 4.40, gives a separate table for each karam.

"A kanal is 5,445 sq ft" holds only on the 66-inch karam, not across Punjab. Take a record of 2 kanal 5 marla. On the 66-inch karam, 2 × 5,445 + 5 × 272.25 = 12,251.25 sq ft. On the 60-inch karam, 2 × 4,500 + 5 × 225 = 10,125 sq ft. The same words differ by 2,126.25 sq ft.

Haryana's HALRIS portal gives the post-settlement measure as a 66-inch karam with 8 kanals to the acre, so a kanal is 605 sq yd, as the DoLR glossary also states. Its pre-settlement 57.157-inch karam has 4 bigha 16 biswa to the acre, and under cooperative settlement 4 bighas make a killa of 40 × 40 karam, about 0.833 acre. No official figure was found for the one-acre killa many people mean. The DoLR glossary puts a murabba at 25 acres.

Himachal's manual makes the pakka bigha of the 99-inch gatha 5/8 acre, and the kacha bigha of Sirmaur and parts of Shimla and Solan 5/24 acre. In villages that count in kanals, it says "a bigha" means 2 or 4 kanals depending on the district, so there it has no single size.

Rajasthan's two jaribs

The central MDDS table gives Rajasthan two bighas, each one jarib square. The Shahjahani jarib of 165 ft makes 27,225 sq ft (0.625 acre), the same as the 99-inch-gatha bigha, since 165 ft is exactly 20 of those gathas. The Gantari jarib of 132 ft makes 17,424 sq ft (0.4 acre). A state agriculture project report converts a bigha at 0.16187 ha or 0.2529 ha, the same two sizes. The Gantari bigha is not the kacha bigha of the Punjab and Himachal manuals, which is about 9,075 sq ft.

Five bighas come to 1,36,125 sq ft (3.125 acres) on the Shahjahani jarib and 87,120 sq ft (2 acres) on the Gantari. MDDS does not say which districts use which jarib, and no Rajasthan revenue-department table was found, so the jarib has to come from your record or your tehsil.

Units elsewhere, with their sources

In every source here a guntha is 1/40 acre and a cent or decimal 1/100 acre, so sq ft = gunthas × 1,089 and sq ft = cents × 435.6. A Karnataka RTC reading 3 acres 20 guntas is 3 × 43,560 + 20 × 1,089 = 1,52,460 sq ft.

The Bihar kattha and the Gujarat guntha are the two entries whose own source warns that the local size can differ. At the Patna figure, 5 kattha is 6,805 sq ft, about 15.62 decimals.

Where no official figure was found

No official size was found for the Uttar Pradesh bigha, biswa and biswansi, the Madhya Pradesh bigha, Gujarat's vigha, the Uttarakhand bigha and nali, the Jharkhand bigha, the Rajasthan biswa and biswansi, Karnataka's anna, the Telangana gunta or the ankanam. The Jharkhand dhur's only figure, in MDDS, does not fit MDDS's own katha.

The 27,225 sq ft "pakka bigha" often quoted for Uttar Pradesh comes from the Punjab and Himachal manuals, not from a UP document.

The converter does not fill these gaps. A bigha in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand or Jharkhand, or a Gujarat vigha, converts only at a size you enter, and the result is labelled as your figure. The other units show that no verified figure exists and why.

Where official sources disagree

Official tables disagree in places, with each other and with arithmetic.

Where a printed figure is a rounding of a definition, the tool uses the definition. Each local size is computed from its rod, jarib or fraction of an acre, and a rounded figure the manual prints, such as Himachal's "about 968 sq yd" for the 56-inch bigha, is shown alongside. MDDS's Assam bigha contradicts every Assam source, so it is not used. Where nothing settles a conflict, as with the Rajasthan biswansi and the Jharkhand dhur, the unit is not converted at all.

Reading the area on your land record

Records are moving to metric units. The Punjab manual directs metric-only revenue records from the agricultural year 1976-77. Himachal's land records went metric from 1 October 1962. Haryana asked its departments in 2021 to state area in acres and square metres, and the central MDDS standard recommends metric units only.

If your deed or record of rights (jamabandi, khatauni, 7/12 or RTC) gives square metres or square feet, that is the figure to rely on. A converted bigha or kanal helps you read it; it does not replace it.

If a record gives only a local unit, confirm its measure first. In Punjab and Himachal, ask the patwari or tehsil office which karam the village uses. Convert compound figures part by part and add them, as in the examples above. The annas on a Karnataka RTC have no official size, so they cannot be converted here. For units outside land records, such as square kilometres, use the general unit converter.

What this tool assumes

• Acres, hectares, square yards and square feet use the exact NIST definitions.
• A local unit converts only when it has a sourced size, and that source is named.
• In Punjab and Himachal you pick the measure your village uses. A unit from another measure says which measure has it.
• The Bihar kattha starts at the glossary's Patna figure of 1,361 sq ft, and the dhur, dhurki and bigha scale from it. Any other size is labelled as yours.
• Bighas with no official size convert only at a size you enter, never at a guessed one.
• Haryana's killa is the cooperative-settlement killa of about 0.833 acre.
• Odisha is not offered: its only figure, a 435 sq ft decimal for house sites, conflicts with the 435.6 sq ft decimal.
• It converts the area you enter. It cannot tell you your plot's area or which measure your record uses.