Land units in south India: cent and guntha

The southern states kept the acre and simply cut it into equal parts. That makes their units exact and the same everywhere, unlike the bigha of the north.

Kerala and Tamil Nadu: the cent

The Government of India land records data standard records "1 acre = 100 cents" for Kerala and Tamil Nadu. A cent is 435.6 square feet or 40.47 square metres. The standard also lists the metric are for Kerala: one are is 2.471 cents.

Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh: the guntha

The standard records "1 acre = 40 guntas" for Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. A guntha is 1,089 square feet, or 121 square yards. Telangana and Maharashtra use the same guntha.

Andhra Pradesh: the kuncham

The standard lists 1 kuncham = 10 cents, which is 4,356 square feet, a tenth of an acre.

Changing between them

• 1 guntha = 2.5 cents
• 1 kuncham = 10 cents = 4 guntha
• 1 acre = 100 cents = 40 guntha = 10 kuncham

Units we have left out

The ground (Chennai) and the ankanam (Andhra Pradesh) are common in plot sales, but we found no official table for them. If your document states them in square feet, use that figure under "My local unit" 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

• 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