Naapi in Nepal: the department, the office, the naksa and the apps

17 August 2026 · 13 min read

Naapi is the Nepali word for measurement and surveying, and it is also the name people use for the Survey Department, the district survey office, and the map that office produces. Here is what each one actually is.

Naapi (नापी) means measurement — surveying. In everyday Nepali it is used for at least four different things: the Survey Department, the survey office in your district, the map that office draws, and, lately, whatever app somebody used to measure a plot. That overlap is why searching "naapi" returns a government department, a training course and a phone app on the same page. This guide separates them.

The short version: naapi is government work, and the government output is a drawing plus a record. Turning that drawing into an area in square feet or Ropani is a separate step, and it is the one GharNaksa Naapi Plotter exists to do.

Naapi Bibhag — the Survey Department

नापी विभाग, the Survey Department, is the national mapping and cadastral authority. It sits under the Ministry of Land Management, Cooperatives and Poverty Alleviation, and its head office is at Min Bhawan, Kathmandu. It maintains the cadastral record — which parcel is where, with which number, at which size — and it runs the public-facing portal, Mero Kitta, that lets a citizen request a copy of that record without queueing.

• Cadastral survey and re-survey of land parcels.
• The map sheets and field books that a parcel's record is built from.
• The national land information system that Mero Kitta is the citizen window onto.
• Geodetic and topographic mapping beyond the cadastre.

Naapi karyalaya — the survey office

The नापी कार्यालय is where the record physically lives and where most people's actual business happens. It is the office named on your lalpurja, and it is the office your Mero Kitta application is routed to. What people go there for:

Several of those can now be started online through the portal. The ones that involve somebody walking onto the land — demarcation, subdivision — still end with a surveyor and a tape.

Naapi naksa — the map itself

A naapi naksa is the cadastral drawing: closed parcel shapes, kitta numbers written inside them, boundary lines, usually a scale, and often a road or a stream along an edge. If you have never had to read one, How to read a Nepali naksa walks through the symbols and the numbers.

Two properties of these sheets cause most of the confusion:

• The scale caption is only true for a sheet at its original size. Photocopy it, screenshot it, or print it with "Fit to page" and the caption is now wrong while still being printed on the paper.
• The drawing shows shape, not area. The legal area is the figure recorded on the lalpurja. Anything you derive from the drawing is a measurement of the drawing.

Both of those are why a measuring tool should calibrate against a length you can verify — a printed dimension, a known road width, a wall you taped — rather than trusting the printed scale. That is exactly how the two-tap calibration works.

Naapi app — which one do people mean?

There is no single thing called "the naapi app". The search covers three quite different products, and it is worth being blunt about which is which.

The official one is Mero Kitta on Google Play, published by Survey Department. Nothing else is the government. If an app or a website offers to look up any kitta number in Nepal for a fee, it is not the department and it does not have that data.

Naapi Plotter is not an app you install at all — it is a web page. Open the calculator in any browser and it works; the measuring happens on your own device, and there is no account. GharNaksa's Construction Calculator is the installable one, and it is aimed at cost and materials as much as land.

What the browser tool actually does

• Opens a naksa as a PDF or a photo — HEIC from an iPhone included — and calibrates it from one known length.
• Traces a boundary corner by corner, with a magnifier on touch so your finger does not hide the point.
• Reads the area in square feet, square metres, Ropani-Aana-Paisa-Dam and Bigha-Katha-Dhur at the same time.
• Measures any two points as a dimension, with a bearing, without changing the area.
• Prices the plot from a rate in any unit, in rupees or a foreign currency.
• Works from tape measurements alone when there is no drawing, by triangulation.
• Exports a labelled PNG or a print-ready PDF, and saves projects in the browser.

Naapi training

This search splits two ways, and the honest answer differs for each.

Training to become a surveyor

Surveying in Nepal is a formal technical qualification, not a weekend course. The recognised routes run through technical education — diploma-level survey and geomatics programmes affiliated to CTEVT, and degree-level geomatics engineering at the engineering campuses — alongside in-service training run by the department for its own staff. Course names, entry requirements, durations and fees change from year to year, so check the current listings on ctevt.org.np and dos.gov.np rather than any blog, including this one.

GharNaksa does not run accredited surveyor training and does not certify anyone. If a page promises a survey licence for a fee, treat that as the warning it is.

Training yourself to read and measure a naksa

This one you can genuinely do in an afternoon, and it is what most people searching "naapi training" actually need — enough competence to check a listing, a lalpurja or a builder's claim without being at anyone's mercy.

1. Learn the sheet: How to read a Nepali naksa — kitta numbers, boundaries, scales, what the symbols mean.

2. Learn the units: How to calculate land area in Nepal, then keep the converters bookmarked.

3. Get a real sheet: apply through Mero Kitta, or photograph one you already have.

4. Measure it: from a photo, or straight from the PDF.

5. Check your work against the area printed on the lalpurja. A few percent apart is normal practice; a factor of ten is a calibration mistake.

The units naapi records use

Records are kept in the traditional systems, and in square metres. The market quotes whichever unit is local. Getting fluent in both directions is most of the battle.

A 1 Ropani plot is a 74 ft square; a 1 Bigha plot is a 270 ft square. Those two facts are worth memorising, because they let you sanity-check a claimed area by eye before you measure anything.

Where GharNaksa fits

We are not naapi. We do not hold records, issue maps, mark boundaries or train surveyors, and nothing produced in our tool is a legal survey. What we do is the arithmetic the department leaves to you: take the drawing you were given, set a scale, trace the parcel, and hand back the area in every unit the market uses. It is free, it runs in the browser, and there is no account.

If the next step needs a draughtsman rather than a browser — an editable AutoCAD DXF, a labelled PDF, an engineer's read on what you can build — GharNaksa offers that as a paid consult from inside the tool after you calculate. Measure it yourself first; you should know the area before you pay anyone to redraw it.

Measure a naapi naksa now