Land Measurement in Uttar Pradesh: Bigha, Biswa and Biswansi

1 bigha in UP is most often taken as the pucca bigha of 27,225 square feet. That equals 3,025 gaj, about 2,529.29 square metres or 0.625 acre. But Uttar Pradesh has no single bigha. Smaller kachha bighas are also used in villages, so always check which bigha a paper or a seller means.

Land measurement units used in Uttar Pradesh

Land in UP is talked about in bigha (बीघा), biswa (बिस्वा) and biswansi (बिस्वांसी). Government records use the hectare. Plots in towns are sold in gaj (square yards) or square feet. The table below lists the sizes found in our research. All the bigha values are commonly used figures, not values from a government notification.

Some property sites round the pucca bigha to 27,000 sq ft. That is 225 sq ft short on every bigha, so use 27,225 sq ft when you need the exact pucca figure.

The chain of units: bigha, biswa, biswansi

In the pucca system the chain is simple:

• 1 bigha = 20 biswa
• 1 biswa = 20 biswansi
• 1 bigha = 400 biswansi = 27,225 sq ft
• 1 biswa = 1,361.25 sq ft = about 126.46 sq m
• 1 biswansi = 68.0625 sq ft = about 6.32 sq m

The biswa stays close to 1,361.25 sq ft in most tables. What changes from place to place is how many biswa people count in one bigha. That is why a kachha bigha can be 10, about 6.67 or 5 biswa.

Acre, hectare and are in bigha (UP)

So 1 acre is 1.6 pucca bigha, which is 32 biswa. One hectare is about 3.95 pucca bigha or about 79.07 biswa.

Official records unit and portal

Land records in Uttar Pradesh are kept on UP Bhulekh, run by the Board of Revenue. The khatauni shows area in hectare. Bigha, biswa and biswansi still appear in local deals and in older papers.

To read a khatauni, take the hectare figure and multiply by about 107,639.1 to get square feet. For example, 0.5 hectare is about 53,819.55 sq ft. That is about 1.98 pucca bigha or about 39.54 biswa.

जमीन नापने का फार्मूला: a simple method

1. Measure the length and breadth of the plot in feet.
2. Multiply them to get the area in square feet.
3. Divide by 27,225 for pucca bigha, by 1,361.25 for biswa, or by 9 for gaj.

Example: a plot of 100 ft by 60 ft is 6,000 sq ft. That is about 4.41 biswa, about 0.22 pucca bigha or about 666.67 gaj. For plots that are not rectangles, use the land area calculator.

Common mistakes

• Mixing pucca and kachha bigha. 5 pucca bigha is 136,125 sq ft, but 5 small bigha of 5 biswa is only 34,031.25 sq ft.
• Treating 27,000 as exact. On 10 bigha the rounding hides 2,250 sq ft.
• Reading hectare as acre. 1 hectare is about 2.47 acre, not 1 acre.
• Assuming katha means the same everywhere. In parts of eastern UP, such as the Gorakhpur belt, people sometimes say katha and dhur for parcels the size of a biswa and a biswansi. Only one unsourced reference says this, so confirm it locally.

How sure are these values?

We did not find an official UP government page that gives bigha or biswa in square feet. The pucca bigha of 27,225 sq ft is the value most sources agree on. Which districts use the 10, 6.67 or 5 biswa bigha could not be confirmed, and sources differ. Some sites also quote other bigha sizes without any source; we have left those out.

For a sale, partition or court matter, confirm the unit with the lekhpal or the tehsil office and check the khatauni on UP Bhulekh. You can convert any value with our bigha to square feet and hectare to bigha pages.