Square Feet to Guntha

Divide by 1,089. A 10,890 sq ft plot is 10 guntha. An acre is 43,560 sq ft, which is exactly 40 guntha.

A guntha is a 33-foot square

That is where the odd-looking 1,089 comes from: 33 × 33. The 33-foot module traces back to the surveyor’s chain used across the Bombay and Madras presidencies, and it fits the acre exactly forty times — which is precisely why it survived. A unit that divides its parent cleanly is a unit that stays in the records.

Unlike the bigha, the guntha does not change value from one state to the next. It is 1,089 sq ft in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana alike.

Reading a 7/12 extract

Maharashtra land records — the satbara utara, or 7/12 extract — state agricultural holdings in hectares and ares, with guntha still in everyday use alongside them. One are is 100 m², which is very close to one guntha at 101.17 m², and the two get conflated constantly in conversation. They are not the same: across a ten-acre holding the difference runs to about 470 m².

For anything smaller than a guntha, the sub-unit is the ana, at one-sixteenth. Where a holding straddles the boundary between residential and agricultural classification, expect the same land to be quoted in guntha by a farmer and in square feet by a developer.