Land units in Assam and Meghalaya

Land in the Brahmaputra valley is measured in bigha, katha and lessa. The sizes are tidy because the smallest unit is a simple square.

The three units

• Lessa: 144 square feet, a square of 12 feet by 12 feet.
• Katha: 20 lessa = 2,880 square feet.
• Bigha: 5 katha = 100 lessa = 14,400 square feet, a square of 120 feet by 120 feet, or 1,600 square yards.

The Statistical Handbook of Meghalaya 2023 gives 1 acre = 3.025 bighas and 1 hectare = 7.47493 bighas. Both follow from a bigha of 14,400 square feet. The lessa of 144 square feet and the 20 lessa block of 2,880 square feet are in the Government of India land records data standard.

Writing an area

Records write bigha-katha-lessa, for example 2B-3K-10L. In lessa that is 2 × 100 + 3 × 20 + 10 = 270 lessa, which is 38,880 square feet or 0.8926 acre.

Do not mix it with the Bengal katha

The Assam katha is a fifth of a bigha. In Bengal and Bihar a katha is a twentieth of a bigha, and far smaller. A buyer from outside the state should always ask for square feet.

Other local units

Some districts have other traditional units in old records. We have no official table for them, so they are not in the converter.

For a sale, a loan or a court paper, go by your own revenue record. Local units can differ between districts and between old and new records. The sizes here were read in the official documents named under Sources on 11 November 2026. This site is not a government site and gives no legal advice.

Questions people ask

Sources

• Statistical Handbook of Meghalaya 2023, Directorate of Economics and Statistics, Government of Meghalaya, conversion table. Open the document
• Meta Data and Data Standards (MDDS), Annexure IV, code directory CD00.01 Measurement units, Table 1.3 Conversion Factors. Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India; the table credits the Department of Land Resources. Open the document

Unit pages

Other states