Dhur to Square Feet

The dhur is not fixed anywhere. The ladder is fixed, and the ladder is what you are actually reading. Every source this site has read puts twenty dhur to the katha and twenty katha to the bigha, and none of them then fixes the dhur; they fix the bigha, or the katha, and the dhur falls out by division. So "how many square feet in a dhur" is really "how big is the bigha here", and the honest range is wide: a Terai bigha of 72,900 ft² gives 182.25, a Patna bigha of about 27,225 gives about 68, and the two are 2.68 times apart for one word. What the ladder does give you, and what is the same on both sides of the border, is the shape of the record. A holding written as "1 bigha 3 katha 12 dhur" is 1 + 3/20 + 12/400 bigha, which is 1.18 bigha, and that fraction is exact whatever the bigha turns out to be. The row above that writes your amount as katha and dhur is doing that arithmetic in reverse.

The Terai dhur is the one with a document behind it, and it is also the one Nepali listings mean. A 2023 reference book from Nepal's Ministry of Federal Affairs and General Administration sets the ladder out in square feet: 1 bigha = 20 katha = 72,900 sq ft, 1 katha = 20 dhur = 3,645 sq ft. Twenty into 3,645 is 182.25, which is 20.25 gaj exactly and 16.9316 m² on the international foot; the book prints its own metric roundings and does not print the dhur in square feet, so the 182.25 is arithmetic on a figure it does print. When a Birgunj or Janakpur listing says "5 dhur" it means five of these, 911.25 ft², and a converter that answers 340 has applied the Patna figure across the border. Terai and Inner Madhesh only: the hills and Kathmandu Valley measure in ropani and aana, and there is no dhur in that system at all.

Bihar publishes its katha as approximate, so its dhur is approximate twice over. The Bihar Revenue Glossary gives the katha as "approx. 1361 sq ft in Patna and around" and says the square-foot measurement varies from region to region. This page divides the 1,361.25 that underlies that rounding by twenty and gets 68.0625 ft², which is 7.5625 gaj and, because the Patna bigha is five eighths of an acre, exactly one 640th of an acre. The tidiness is a property of the assumed bigha, not of anything Bihar has published, and the widget labels the figure as a convention consistent with the glossary rather than a value the state prints. Outside the Patna belt the katha figures in circulation (Bettiah, Chhapra, Hajipur) trace to one uncited encyclopedia article and contradict each other, so a dhur derived from them would be a guess divided by twenty. Bihar keeps its record in decimal and acre; 1 decimal is 435.6 ft² everywhere, and that is the number on the khatian that binds.

Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand use the word, and no document read for this site gives it a size. The Uttar Pradesh ladder this site has been able to source is bigha, biswa and biswansi, from the 1855 revenue glossary and the settlement manuals, and the UP Revenue Code, 2006 was searched in full and contains no unit of area at all; every figure in it is in hectares. That the districts along the Bihar border say dhur is not in doubt, but which bigha sits above it is, and the site will not print a number it has only heard. Jharkhand is the harder case: the Ranchi settlement report of 1902‑1910 lists the customary units as pawa, anna, rupee and hat and records every area in acres and decimals, so a Ranchi dhur has no ladder to hang from and the figures on offer are Bihar's with the label changed. Both regions return a refusal on the widget and the unit the record actually uses.

Numbers you will meet that are wrong. 1 dhur = 100 ft² belongs to no ladder: twenty of them make a 2,000 ft² katha and four hundred make a 40,000 ft² bigha, and no government prints either. 1 dhur = 68 ft² in Nepal is the Patna figure carried across the border, 2.68 times too small; 1 dhur = 182 ft² in Patna is the same mistake the other way. 1 dhur = 17 m² for the Terai is fine on a sale board and wrong on a deed, where twenty dhur at 17 invent 1.37 m²; the figure is 16.931579. A gaj figure rounded to 20 gaj or 7.5 gaj has dropped the fraction: the Terai dhur is 20.25 gaj and the Patna one 7.5625, and both are exact on their ladders. And a table that gives one dhur for all of Bihar is quoting Patna for Bettiah and Chhapra, where the state itself says the katha is different.