Biswa to Square Feet: 453.75, 871.2 or 1,361.25, by Measure
Biswa to square feet, square metres and gaj by measure: Delhi 453.75, Rajasthan 132 ft chain 871.2, pucca and 165 ft chain 1,361.25. Biswansi too. Each graded.
Biswa to Square Feet — a twentieth of which bigha?
A biswa is one twentieth of the local bigha, and the local bigha is not one size. Delhi records put it at 453.75 ft²; the pucca ladder of Uttar Pradesh and the Rajasthan 165 ft chain put it at 1,361.25; the Simla hill settlements at 405. Pick the measure first, and this page says how well each figure is sourced.
Search "biswa to square feet" and you will be handed a number, usually 1,361.25 or 453.75, with no state attached. Both are real. They are also three times apart, and each is wrong in the other's district. The biswa is defined by division: twenty of them make a bigha, whatever the bigha is where the land lies. So the biswa inherits every disagreement the bigha has, and a converter that prints one figure has guessed which bigha you meant.
Two facts are fixed. Twenty biswa make a bigha in every ladder that has a biswa in it, and twenty biswansi make a biswa, so a biswansi is a four‑hundredth of a bigha. Everything else is the size of the bigha: 27,225 ft² on the Rajasthan 165 ft chain and the pucca ladder, 9,075 in Delhi revenue records and the Haryana pre‑consolidation table, 10,000 on the Punjab 60‑inch karam, 8,100 in the Simla hill settlements. Divide each by twenty and you have the biswa for that place.
This page asks which measure governs the land before it converts, grades each figure by the document behind it, writes the answer back in the bigha‑biswa‑biswansi form a jamabandi uses, and refuses where no document fixes the number. The bigha itself, state by state, is on this site's bigha page; the biswa here is always that page's bigha divided by twenty.
| Biswa | — |
|---|---|
| Square feet | — |
| Square metres | — |
| Gaj (square yards) | — |
| Acres · hectares | — |
| As a record writes it | — |
| Biswansi | — |
| One biswa here | — |
| Biswa per bigha · per acre | — |
| How good is this figure | — |
| If the other biswa was meant | — |
A biswa has no size of its own. It is one twentieth of whichever bigha the record uses. Every source this page rests on defines it that way and none of them starts from the biswa: the Rajasthan rules fix a chain and say one chain squared is a bigha, the Punjab manual captions its bigha as “20 Biswas”, the Delhi award writes plot areas as bigha and biswa and totals them in square metres. So “how many square feet in a biswa” is really “how big is the bigha here” divided by twenty, and the answers on this page run from 405 ft² in the Simla hill settlements to 1,361.25 on the 165 ft chain, a spread of 3.4 times on one word. The three figures you will meet most are 453.75 (Delhi, the Haryana kachcha table, and the UP kachcha at one third of pucca), 871.2 (the Rajasthan 132 ft chain) and 1,361.25 (the pucca bigha and the 165 ft chain). Which one a listing means depends on where the land is, and a page that did not ask has guessed.
Delhi's biswa is 453.75 ft², and the one document that says so is an acquisition award, not a statute. Land Acquisition Award No. 03/2010‑11 for Village Mandoli footnotes its area table with “1 Biswa = 42.153375 Sq. Mtrs.” and its plot rows show 4 bigha 16 biswa against one acre. Ninety‑six biswa to the acre gives 43,560 ÷ 96 = 453.75 ft² exactly, and 453.75 × 0.09290304 = 42.1548 m²; the award's own metric footnote is 0.004% under that, which is rounding in its conversion column, and this page prints the square‑foot figure and shows the award's metric one beside it. The Delhi Land Revenue Act, 1954 defines no unit of area, so the number is what one Delhi revenue office used in one district, and it is stated here as that. The same 453.75 appears twice more by different routes: Haryana's HALRIS pre‑consolidation table puts 4 bigha 16 biswa to the acre on a 57.157‑inch karam, and Douie's 1930 settlement manual makes the UP kachcha bigha “exactly three times” smaller than the pucca one, 27,225 ÷ 3 ÷ 20. Three routes to one number is reassuring; it is still not a statute.
A biswansi is a twentieth of a biswa, so a four‑hundredth of a bigha, and on the Punjab 60‑inch karam it is exactly one square karam. The ladder is 20 × 20: 1 bigha = 20 biswa = 400 biswansi. On the Delhi biswa a biswansi is 453.75 ÷ 20 = 22.6875 ft²; on the pucca biswa it is 1,361.25 ÷ 20 = 68.0625 ft², which is also, to the digit, the Bihar dhur, because both are one four‑hundredth of the same 27,225 ft² bigha. The Punjab Land Records Manual gives the cleanest version: on the 60‑inch karam “1 biswansi = 1 square karam”, and a karam of 5 ft squared is 25 ft², so the biswa is 500 ft² and the bigha 10,000, a tract where every rung of the ladder is a round number in square feet and none of the aggregators carries it. A jamabandi entry of “3‑7‑12” means 3 bigha 7 biswa 12 biswansi; on the Delhi measure that is 3 × 9,075 + 7 × 453.75 + 12 × 22.6875 = 30,673.5 ft², and this page writes its answer back in the same three‑rung form so you can check it against the record.
Rajasthan writes six bighas into a rule, so it has six biswas, and the kachcha one is not a third of the pucca one. Appendix I to the Rajasthan Land Revenue (Land Records) Rules, 1957 schedules chains of 110, 127½, 132, 150, 152½ and 165 feet by former princely state, and its acre column is written in the very form this page prints: “1 Bigha 12 Biswas” to the acre on the 165 ft chain, which checks, because 43,560 ÷ 27,225 = 1.6 and 0.6 of twenty is twelve. The market calls the 132 ft chain the kachcha bigha, but the rules use no such word, and the ratio of the two chains squared is 25:16, so the Jodhpur biswa is 871.2 ft² and not the 453.75 that “kachcha” would give you on the UP ladder. Sikar district holds both the 165 ft measure and the 110 ft Thikana Sikar measure, so inside one district a biswa is 1,361.25 or 605 ft²; in Bikaner and Churu the chain follows tenure, khalsa villages on 127½ ft and jagir villages on 165. Read the measure off the jamabandi, not off a district name. Ajmer, never a princely state, is not in the schedule at all, and this page declines to give it a number.
Numbers you will meet that are wrong. 1 biswa = 1,350 ft² in Delhi is on no ladder: it is the pucca biswa rounded down and moved to a city whose records use 453.75, so it is three times too large for a Delhi plot. 1 biswa = 125 m² is the same figure again in metric, 1,345 ft², exact on neither ladder. 1 biswa = 484 ft² in Rajasthan belongs to a family (9,680 / 484 / 24.2) that is the Himachal market bigha, biswa and biswansi in square yards, relabelled as square feet, and no chain in Appendix I squares to 9,680. 1 biswa = 435.6 ft², standard is the Himachal market biswa, one decimal exactly, which is what makes it look official; no document fixing it was found and the state's own settlement records used 405. A Rajasthan kachcha biswa of 453.75 is the UP one‑third rule applied to a state whose rules never say kachcha; the 132 ft chain gives 871.2. And any Uttarakhand biswa printed to two decimals rests on a bigha that the circulating sources put anywhere from 5,400 to 25,920 ft², which is why this page prints none.
Exact by definition: 1 ft = 0.3048 m, so 1 ft² = 0.09290304 m²
(NIST Handbook 44, Appendix C; the international foot has been the only U.S. foot since 1 January 2023,
85 FR 62698); 1 gaj = 1 yd² = 9 ft²; 1 acre = 43,560 ft²; 1 hectare = 10,000 m².
The ladder relations 20 biswa = 1 bigha and 20 biswansi = 1 biswa are definitional inside every
source that has a biswa (the Rajasthan acre column, the Punjab manual's captions and biswansi line,
the Delhi and Haryana 4 bigha 16 biswa to the acre), and no source found departs from them. Every
square‑foot, metric, gaj and acre figure follows from those and from the bigha you chose, with no
rounding until the screen runs out of digits.
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, note “One chain x One chain is equal to one
Bigha”. The biswa is the chain squared divided by twenty; the acre column prints “1 Bigha 12
Biswas” for 165 ft, “2 1/2 Bighas” for 132 and “3 Bighas 12 Biswas”
for 110, and each checks against the chain. For the 152½ ft chain the schedule disagrees with
itself (Chittor prints 152¼, and the acre column implies 23,232 ft² against the
23,256.25 the chain gives), so that biswa is marked approximate. These are the sources of this site's
bigha page, used here unchanged.
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. One award in one district; the
Delhi Land Revenue Act, 1954 defines no unit of area. Haryana: Government of Haryana / NIC, HALRIS
“Units of Measurements”, cited from the Internet Archive snapshot because the live host
refused connection, giving 1 karam 57.157 in, 20 biswa = 1 bigha, 4 bigha 16 biswa to the acre; 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. Punjab: Punjab
Land Records Manual, chapter 4 part F “Land Measures”, para 4.40 and the BIGHA MEASURE
conversion tables, plrs.org.in: schedule III, “1 Bigha (3025 sq.yards - 20 Biswas) = 2529.285264
square metres”; schedule IV, 1 biswansi = 1 square karam, 20 biswa = 1 bigha = 929.0304 m²;
schedule VI, 1 bigha = 843.07512 m² captioned 1008.33 square yards, a 0.002% self‑disagreement,
and this page computes from the karam, which reproduces the metric figure. The bigha appears in only
three of the manual's seven schedules; the rest of the state is kanal and marla.
Uttar Pradesh: 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”; the kachcha at one third is J. M. Douie,
Punjab Settlement Manual (1930) para 243, “exactly three times” smaller, with Wilson's
warning that it is “in some places a third, in others only a fourth”. Not statutory: the
Uttar Pradesh Revenue Code, 2006 was searched in full and uses neither bigha nor biswa, expressing every
area in hectares. The western‑UP local bigha of 5 biswa (6,806.25 ft²) is commonly quoted
with no primary source found; under it the biswa is still the pucca 1,361.25 and only the count per
bigha changes, so it is a note here and not a row. Himachal Pradesh: the 405 ft² biswa
is one twentieth of the 900 square yard bigha in the Punjab States Gazetteer, volume VIII, Simla Hill
States, 1910, “bighas of 900 square yards”, Nalagarh measured on a 4½ ft karam;
the 435.6 ft² biswa is one twentieth of the one‑fifth‑acre bigha the market uses,
commonly quoted with no primary source found, and the Himachal revenue sites did not respond when this
was checked.
Refused: Uttarakhand, because the published bigha values for one state span 5,400 to
25,920 ft² and the circulating nali ladder fails its own arithmetic; Ajmer and every Rajasthan
district created after 1957, because Appendix I is organised by former princely state and Ajmer, a
British commissioner's province, is not in it; Odisha, because biswa appears in its British‑era
records with no bigha above it and cannot be read as one twentieth of anything; Bengal, Bihar, Assam and
Nepal, because those ladders divide the bigha into katha, not biswa, and this site's katha page
carries them.
Worked example
A Delhi jamabandi shows 4 bigha 16 biswa. How many square feet is that, and is it really one acre?
- 4 bigha 16 biswa is 4 × 20 + 16 = 96 biswa. On the Delhi measure the bigha is 9,075 ft² and a biswa is one twentieth of it, 453.75 ft². 96 × 453.75 = 43,560 ft².
- 43,560 ft² is one acre exactly, which is why the award's plot rows line up 4 bigha 16 biswa against one acre. In metric it is 43,560 × 0.09290304 = 4,046.8564 m², and in gaj 43,560 ÷ 9 = 4,840.
- The same 96 biswa on the pucca ladder would be 96 × 1,361.25 = 130,680 ft², three acres. Read the other way, one acre is only 32 pucca biswa, or 1 bigha 12 biswa on the Rajasthan 165 ft chain, exactly as that schedule's acre column prints it.
43,560 ft², 4,046.86 m², 4,840 gaj: one acre, written back as 4 bigha 16 biswa. The 453.75 figure is one Delhi acquisition award's own footnote (1 biswa = 42.153375 sq m) and no statute; the record is the authority. On the pucca ladder the same entry would be three acres.
18 values on this page were driven in a browser and compared with independently derived figures on 2026-09-09 (2414 values across 203 calculators site-wide).
Questions
How many square feet is 1 biswa?
It is one twentieth of the local bigha, so it depends where the land is. In Delhi revenue records and the Haryana pre-consolidation table a biswa is 453.75 ft² (42.15 m², 50.42 gaj), and the UP kachcha bigha at one third of pucca gives the same figure. On the pucca or shahjahani bigha and on the Rajasthan 165 ft chain it is 1,361.25 ft² (126.46 m², 151.25 gaj). On the Rajasthan 132 ft chain it is 871.2; on the Punjab 60-inch karam 500; in the Simla hill settlements 405; on the Himachal market bigha 435.6. A page that gives one number without asking the state has guessed.
How many biswa in a bigha, and how many biswansi in a biswa?
Twenty and twenty, in every ladder that has a biswa in it: 1 bigha = 20 biswa = 400 biswansi. That part does not change between states. What changes is the bigha, so a biswansi is 22.6875 ft² on the Delhi measure, 68.0625 on the pucca one, and exactly 25 ft² (one square karam) on the Punjab 60-inch karam. A record entry of 3-7-12 means 3 bigha 7 biswa 12 biswansi.
Is 1 biswa 1,350 square feet in Delhi?
No. That figure is the pucca biswa of 1,361.25 rounded down and moved to a city whose records use 453.75, so it overstates a Delhi plot three times. The Delhi figure comes from a Land Acquisition Award for Village Mandoli, which footnotes 1 biswa = 42.153375 sq m and lines up 4 bigha 16 biswa against one acre: 43,560 ÷ 96 = 453.75. It is a revenue office's figure, not a statute, and the jamabandi for the parcel is the authority.