The guntha, Indian unit of area
The guntha is one fortieth of an acre: 121 square yards, 1089 square feet, 101.17 square meters. It is the square of a side 33 feet long, and land is still counted in it across Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
The metric are, 100 square meters, has died almost everywhere and is alive in western India, and the guntha is the reason: 1.17 square meters separate them, 1.2 per cent. When Maharashtra and Karnataka converted their land records to hectares and ares, the new unit landed on the plot size the villages already knew, and nobody had to relearn anything. The same 33-foot side ties the guntha to the Punjabi ladder: it is exactly four marla, a marla being the square of three karam and a guntha the square of six.
The guntha in other units
| 1 guntha | 0.000101171 km² |
| 1 guntha | 0.0101171 ha |
| 1 guntha | 1.01171 a |
| 1 guntha | 101.171 m² |
| 1 guntha | 1,011,714 cm² |
| 1 guntha | 0.0000390625 mi² |
| 1 guntha | 0.025 ac |
| 1 guntha | 1,089 ft² |
| 1 guntha | 156,816 in² |
| 1 guntha | 121 yd² |
| 1 guntha | 101,171,411 mm² |
| 1 guntha | 0.101171 dunum |
| 1 guntha | 30.6044 tsubo |
| 1 guntha | 0.0240884 feddan |
| 1 guntha | 0.0632321 rai |
| 1 guntha | 30.6044 pyeong |
| 1 guntha | 0.578122 qirat |
| 1 guntha | 2.5 cent |
| 1 guntha | 0.2 kanal |
Frequently asked questions
How many guntha make an acre, and how many a hectare?
Forty to the acre by definition, and 98.84 to the hectare. A ten-guntha plot is therefore a quarter acre, 1,011.7 square meters, and rural land is rarely cut smaller than that.
Where does the guntha appear on an official document?
Nowhere. Maharashtra's 7/12 extract, the satbara, prints the area in hectares, ares and square meters, and the villager reads the are column as guntha. That mental conversion is what keeps the unit alive while it never appears in the register.
Guntha or cent, what is the difference?
One guntha is 2.5 cent: the guntha is a fortieth of an acre, the cent a hundredth. The first serves Maharashtra and Karnataka, the second Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and the two meet in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.