  Static electric response properties of atoms and molecules are reported
within the real-space Cartesian grid implementation of pseudopotential
Kohn-Sham (KS) density functional theory (DFT). A detailed systematic
investigation is made for a representative set of atoms and molecules, through
a number of properties like total ground-state electronic energies, permanent
dipole moment ($\bm{\mu}$), static average dipole polarizability
($\overline{\alpha}$). This is further extended to first-hyperpolarizability
($\bm{\beta}$) in molecules. It employs a recently developed non-uniform
grid-optimization technique, with a suitably chosen fixed initial applied
field. A simple variant of the finite-field method, using a rational function
fit to the dipole moment with respect to electric field, is adopted. We make
use of Labello-Ferreira-Kurtz (LFK) basis set, which has performed quite well
in these scenarios. To assess the efficacy and feasibility, four XC functionals
such as LDA, BLYP, PBE and LBVWN are chosen. Present results are compared with
available literature (both theoretical and experimental) values, whenever
possible. In all instances, they show excellent agreement with the respective
atom-centered-grid results, very widely used in many quantum chemistry
programs. This demonstrates a viable alternative towards accurate prediction of
response properties of many-electron systems in Cartesian coordinate grid.
