Guntha, Acre and Ankanam: Karnataka’s Land Units, Converted

Land on the Sarjapur Road corridor is described in at least three vocabularies at once. A revenue record says acres and guntha. A broker says ankanam. A brochure says square feet. All three can describe the same parcel, and only two of them are arithmetic you can check.

This is the arithmetic, and the rule for what to do when two documents disagree.

The four numbers worth memorising

Everything below follows from these. Nothing here is an estimate; each line is a fixed ratio, not a market figure.

If you want the conversion run for you rather than done on paper, this site publishes a guntha to square feet converter that also prints the acres-and-guntha pair a revenue record writes. It is arithmetic on your own input and nothing else.

Why one guntha is 1,089 square feet

The acre is the parent unit and everything else hangs off it. An acre is 43,560 square feet, and the guntha is defined as one fortieth of an acre. Divide and you get 1,089 square feet exactly, with no rounding and no regional variation.

The number is easier to trust once you see its shape: 33 feet by 33 feet is 1,089 square feet. A guntha is a square with 33-foot sides. Forty of them, laid out, are an acre.

The same figure in the other two systems: 121 square yards, because 1,089 divided by 9 is 121; and 101.17 square metres. In Karnataka the spelling wanders — guntha, gunta, kuntha — and none of the spellings changes the arithmetic.

Where the acre’s definition comes from

The acre is not a local convention. It is 4,840 square yards, and the yard has been fixed at 0.9144 metres exactly since the international agreement on the unit, which is why an acre converts to 4,046.8564 square metres with no argument about the last digit. That is also why the square-metre column above can be stated rather than approximated.

It matters because metric is the system Indian law actually recognises for commercial statements. Section 10 of the Legal Metrology Act, 2009 prohibits quoting a price, issuing an invoice, publishing an advertisement or expressing a dimension in any transaction otherwise than in the standard units, and area’s standard unit is the square metre. Customary units survive in speech and in older records; the metric figure is the one a document has to be able to produce.

Ankanam: a customary unit, not a defined one

Ankanam is the unit you will hear on site and almost never see on a certificate. Around Bengaluru it is commonly taken as 72 square feet, which is a rectangle of 6 feet by 12 feet.

Treat that as vocabulary, not as a conversion factor. No standard fixes the ankanam, its value is not uniform wherever it is used, and it does not appear in the records that decide a dispute. If a plot is described to you in ankanam, ask for the extent as the sale deed and the revenue record state it, then convert from there.

The same caution applies to the units used across the state line. On the Tamil Nadu side of the corridor the working units are the cent and the ground, which are a different family entirely — those are set out in the companion piece on Tamil Nadu’s land units.

How a Karnataka revenue record actually writes an extent

This is where more conversions go wrong than anywhere in the arithmetic. A record of rights writes an extent as acres and guntha, and it writes them as a pair separated by a point.

An extent shown as 1.20 is one acre and twenty guntha. It is not one and two tenths of an acre. Read as a decimal it would be 1.2 acres, which is 48 guntha — an error of eight guntha, or 8,712 square feet, on a single parcel.

• 1.20 means 1 acre 20 guntha, which is 60 guntha in total, or 65,340 square feet.
• 0.20 means 20 guntha, which is 21,780 square feet — half an acre.
• 2.00 means 2 acres exactly, which is 80 guntha, or 87,120 square feet.

The digits to the right of the point count guntha and stop at 39. If you see a figure with 40 or more on the right of the point, you are reading something other than an acres-and-guntha extent.

Which number wins when two documents disagree

The record of rights for agricultural land in Karnataka is maintained under the record-of-rights provisions of the Karnataka Land Revenue Act, 1964 — section 127 for the record itself, section 128 for reporting an acquisition of rights, and section 129 for the register of mutations. Section 133 of the same Act attaches a presumption of correctness to an entry in the record of rights, and that presumption stands until the contrary is proved.

So the order of authority runs: the extent in the registered instrument and the revenue record first; a survey sketch prepared by the survey department next, because it fixes where the extent physically sits; and a brochure or a listing last, because neither is a record of anything. Where a document states an extent, that stated extent governs — the customary conversion does not overrule it.

Terms like record of rights, mutation, khata and carpet area are set out plainly in the property glossary on this site, each with the source that defines it.

Converting without making the two common mistakes

Two errors account for most of the bad numbers in circulation.

• Treating the acres-and-guntha pair as a decimal. Covered above. Convert the guntha separately and add.
• Converting land units into apartment area. Guntha, acre and ankanam measure land. Carpet area is a different quantity with a statutory definition — section 2(k) of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 defines it as the net usable floor area of an apartment, excluding external walls, service shafts, exclusive balcony or verandah and exclusive open terrace. The two never convert into one another.

A worked example, end to end. A parcel recorded as 3.10: that is 3 acres and 10 guntha. Three acres is 120 guntha, plus 10 makes 130 guntha. At 1,089 square feet each, 130 guntha is 141,570 square feet. In metric, 130 multiplied by 101.17 is 13,152 square metres.

What to ask for before you trust any figure

• The extent as written in the registered instrument, and the extent as written in the revenue record — both, in their own words.
• The survey number and, where the parcel is a subdivision, the hissa number, so the extent is tied to a specific piece of ground rather than to a survey number as a whole.
• A survey sketch, where only part of a survey number is being sold. The extent tells you how much; only the sketch tells you which part.
• The metric figure, because the square metre is the standard unit a commercial statement has to be able to produce.

SUYUG’s own registered projects sit on land whose revenue address is printed on the K-RERA certificate itself, down to survey number, village, hobli and taluk — the node page for Sompura Gate carries the jurisdiction, the regulator and the register those certificates belong to. An extent you cannot trace to a survey number is not an extent; it is a claim.