Bigha Converter — by state, and where there is no answer

Hectares, acres and square metres into bigha, katha, biswa and dhur, against the measure that actually governs the land. Rajasthan alone has six bighas written into its own rules; several states have none at all.

Type "hectare to bigha" into a search box and you will be handed a single number. There is no single number. The Government of India does not have one: its own Agriculture Census tells the enumerator to write down the local unit and its conversion factor to hectares, to three decimal places, and asks only that the factor be uniform within a tehsil. That instruction is an admission that the unit changes between tehsils.

The spread is not a rounding argument. A bigha runs from 12,100 ft² in the Thikana Sikar villages of Sikar district to 72,900 ft² in the Nepal Terai, on the same word. Inside Rajasthan, which is the only jurisdiction here that writes its bighas into a rule, the largest statutory bigha is 125% bigger than the smallest, and Sikar district contains both ends of that range.

So this page asks which measure applies before it answers, and it tells you how well each one is sourced. The options are grouped by how much weight the number can bear: a value fixed by a state rule and a value that is only widely repeated do not look the same here, because they are not the same thing. Seven regions get no number at all.

In this measure	—
Sub-units	—
One bigha here	—
Bigha per acre · per hectare	—
Square metres	—
Square feet	—
Acres · hectares	—
How good is this factor	—
If the other bigha was meant	—

Rajasthan (statutory): Rajasthan Land Revenue (Land Records) Rules, 1957, rule 70 and Appendix I to Part I, “Statement showing the Land Measures in Different Units of Rajasthan”, official PDF updated to 2023 on landrevenue.rajasthan.gov.in. Read from a scanned schedule: the Karauli row prints “18‑18/25 Bighas” where the arithmetic requires Biswas, and the Bikaner khalsa acre column prints “13,17½89 Biswas” where the chain gives 13 171/289. Both reconstructions check exactly against the chain; the areas here are derived from the chain lengths, which are the legible part. For the 152½ ft chain the schedule disagrees with itself: Udaipur and Bhilwara print 152′½ and Chittor prints 152′¼, and the printed acre column (1 bigha 17½ biswa) implies 23,232 ft² against the 23,256.25 ft² the chain gives.

Punjab: Punjab Land Records Manual, chapter 4 part F “Land Measures”, para 4.40 and the BIGHA MEASURE conversion tables, plrs.org.in. The bigha appears in only three of the manual's seven schedules; the 66‑inch, 57.5‑inch and 54‑inch karam tracts, which are most of the state, have no bigha and use kanal and marla. On the 57.157‑inch karam the manual's metric figure is 843.07512 m² (9,074.79 ft²) while its own caption says 1008.33 square yards (9,075.00 ft²); this page computes from the karam, which reproduces the metric figure. Haryana: Government of Haryana / NIC, HALRIS “Units of Measurements”, cited from the Internet Archive snapshot because the live host refused connection, giving 4 bigha 16 biswa to the acre on the 57.157‑inch karam; the pakka figure is from the Gazetteer of the Gurgaon District 1883‑84 and the Rohtak District Gazetteer 1910, para 188. Modern Haryana jamabandi is kanal and marla, not bigha. Delhi: Government of NCT of Delhi, Revenue Department, Land Acquisition Award No. 03/2010‑11, Village Mandoli, whose “Measurement and True Area” table footnotes 1 biswa = 42.153375 sq mtrs and whose plot rows show 4 bigha 16 biswa to the acre. That is one award in one district; no statute fixes it.

West Bengal, Assam and Bangladesh: Manual of Mensuration and Surveying for Mandals and Patwaris in Assam, Shillong 1900, sections 30(a) and 30(b), still published by the Assam Revenue and Disaster Management Department and read here from an Internet Archive snapshot of that government URL because the host did not respond. Its own cross‑checks close exactly (1 acre = 3 bigha 8 chatak on the Bengal ladder, 3 bigha 2½ lessa on the Assam one). For Bangladesh the source is current and its own: Ministry of Land, “Standard Units of Land Measurement in Bangladesh”, giving 1 katha = 720 sq ft and 20 katha = 1 bigha. Neither the West Bengal Land Reforms Act, 1955 nor the Assam agricultural land Act of 2015 defines a bigha; the 2015 Act uses the word operatively and contains no metric measure at all, so the widely copied citation of it for 14,400 ft² is not something this page repeats. Which ladder the Barak Valley uses today could not be confirmed from any modern Assam source.

Nepal: Government of Nepal, MoFAGA and PLGSP, Reference Book on Building By‑laws and Building Permit System, June 2023, page 5, printing 1 bigha = 20 katha = 72,900 sq ft; corroborated by the Central Bureau of Statistics agriculture census constant 1 hectare = 1.476569 bigha. Four metric values for the same bigha are in official or reference print and differ in the fifth figure: 6,772.63 m² (from 72,900 ft² on the international foot, which is what this page uses), 6,772.41 (MoFAGA), 6,772.45 (implied by the census constant) and 6,771.41 (UN, 1966).

Uttar Pradesh and Bihar: the 27,225 ft² pucca bigha is H. H. Wilson, A Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Terms (1855), “the standard Bigha of the revenue surveys of the north‑west provinces is equal to 3025 square yards, or 5/8ths of an acre”, with J. M. Douie, Punjab Settlement Manual (1930) para 243 for the 99‑inch gatha and for the kachcha bigha being “exactly three times” smaller. It is not statutory: the Uttar Pradesh Revenue Code, 2006 was searched in full and uses neither bigha nor biswa, expressing every area in hectares. Bihar's figure is arithmetic, not a published one: the Bihar Revenue Glossary (Department of Revenue and Land Reforms, approved 13.10.2025) gives the katha as “approx. 1361 sq ft in Patna and around” and the bigha only as “approx. 20 Kattha”, so 20 × 1,361.25 gives 27,225 while the department's own rounded 1361 gives the 27,220 that circulates. Neither figure is one Bihar prints. Uttar Pradesh kachcha: Wilson says it is “in some places a third, in others only a fourth” of the standard, and Douie warns that the zamindars' actual bigha “does not always correspond with the kacha bigha used in settlement surveys”, because it is 400 squares of a local pace. The Gazetteer of the Province of Oudh records 1,008 square yards at Biswan and about 1,140 at Mahmudabad in the same volume. So the 9,075 figure is one third of 27,225 restated, not a measurement, and the 5‑biswa 6,806.25 figure is commonly quoted with no primary source found. A half‑pucca usage of about 13,612 ft² circulates too. No district mapping is offered for either.

Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh: commonly quoted, no primary source found. The Himachal 8,712 ft² figure (one fifth of an acre) is what the market and the press use and carries no citation anywhere; the competing 8,100 ft² is documented, in the Punjab States Gazetteer volume VIII, Simla Hill States, 1910, which records areas in “bighas of 900 square yards” and says of Bashahr “the bigha is the ordinary kacha bigha of which 5‑3/8 go to the acre”. The Sirmur State Gazetteer 1934 gives that district a third and fourth value again. Himachal revenue sites did not respond when this was checked. For Gujarat the vigha is not a unit of the record of rights, which uses hectare, are and square metre with guntha as the sub‑unit; the 16‑guntha reading is attested for Saurashtra and the same sources add “in some parts 24 or 25 gunthas”, with 20 guntha, 16,875 ft² and a Gaikwadi Amreli vigha of 25,600 ft² all in circulation. For Madhya Pradesh the Land Revenue Code, 1959 defines no unit of area, the record is in hectares and square metres, and 12,000 ft² is a broker convention with no revenue‑department source.

Definitions used throughout: 1 acre = 43,560 ft², 1 ft = 0.3048 m exactly, so 1 ft² = 0.09290304 m² and the 165 ft bigha is 2,529.285264 m² exactly. 1 decimal = 1/100 acre = 435.6 ft²; 1 guntha = 1/40 acre = 1,089 ft². Access limits worth stating: the Haryana, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Himachal and Assam land‑record portals all refused connections or returned nothing during this research, so five of the jurisdictions here could not be checked against their own state sites.