Marla: how plot sizes are still described in the north

Because bigha was never standardised. It grew out of local practice, so each region settled on its own size. A pucca bigha in Rajasthan is about 27,225 sq ft, a kachcha bigha in the same state is roughly 9,075 sq ft, Gujarat's vigha is 17,424 sq ft, Madhya Pradesh works with about 12,000 sq ft, and the hill districts of Uttarakhand use a bigha closer to 6,804 sq ft. Always ask which bigha is being quoted, then get the area restated in square yards.

They are the same idea in different languages. A bigha is the parent unit, and it gets divided into twenty parts. In Haryana and Uttar Pradesh those parts are called biswa, and in Bihar, Jharkhand and Bengal they are called katha. Since the parent bigha varies, so do biswa and katha, which is why a Bihar katha is about 1,361 sq ft while a Bengal cottah is only 720 sq ft.

On the Haryana side you will hear bigha, biswa, kanal and marla, with kanal and marla appearing in the jamabandi. On the Alwar side of Rajasthan it is mostly pucca and kachcha bigha. Sale deeds through the whole belt are written in square yards, which is the unit we quote in.

Forty guntha, eight kanal, 160 marla or 100 cent. All four are standardised, so those numbers hold wherever you are. Bigha is the odd one out, and the answer there depends entirely on the state.

Revenue departments moved to metric for record keeping, so jamabandi, khasra and khatian extracts carry hectares and ares. Everyday conversation stayed with the traditional units. You need both: hectares to read your papers and square yards to sign your deed.

The same unit with different spellings. Vigha is the Gujarati form, bigha the North Indian one. A Gujarat vigha is usually taken as 17,424 sq ft, which is not what a Haryana bigha means, so the spelling difference hides a real size difference.

Square feet, every time. Convert both offers to a price per square foot and the comparison becomes honest in seconds. Headline prices per bigha or per katha hide too much because the units themselves are not fixed.

A 1,500 sq. yd. farm land is 13,500 sq ft. That is about 2.5 kanal or 50 marla in Haryana language, roughly 0.5 pucca bigha in Alwar, about 0.77 vigha in Gujarat terms, 12.4 guntha, just under 10 katha in Bihar, 31 cent in the south, or 0.31 acre.