India's public data, already reconciled. We turn questions about India into evidence you can map, compare and cite. Explore maps on https://xitter.cf/t.co/1dWdFjWa7J
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On paper, eastern UP and Bihar are mostly villages. From orbit, their bright night light more than doubled between 2012 and 2024.
Our essay in collaboration with @JungIndien argues India needs a third category for places that are neither village nor town.
Census 2011 says 31% of India is Urban, while World Bank and UN estimate it to be 55% and 63% respectively. So, why does India underestimate its urban population?
@SpatialIndia argues that the fault lies with the Census’s two-box urban/rural classification criteria and calls for a third category for areas in transition.
jungindien.in/blog/dehat-by-…
Spatial India retweeted
In Swades (2004), an engineer from NASA brings electricity to his village.
Some 20 years ago, electricity reaching a village was the sort of achievement that deserved to be celebrated in cinemas.
Launched in 2017, Saubhagya scheme would electrify 2.86 crore households by 2022, including Leisang in Manipur which is counted as the last inhabited census village.
In this satellite image created by @SpatialIndia you can see the growth of bright lights in the farming districts of Eastern UP and Bihar between 2012 to 2024.
Rural India is urbanising rapidly modernising but is the Indian Census equipped to see it?
@JungIndien’s latest essay in collaboration with @SpatialIndia examines the rules behind Census classification, and why India needs a third category for places between villages and towns.
Read here: jungindien.in/blog/dehat-by-…
Every Indian dataset is drawn on a different India.
Telangana had 10 in the 2011 census. The last big health survey counted 31. Today it's 33. Every dataset you download picked a different year's map.
Put them all on one map and things start to show up. Like 86 districts where 4 in 10 kids were stunted, and banks lend less per person than in three out of four districts.
We do the slow part. 100+ indicators on one district map, ready to compare with each other or with your own data: spatialindia.com
India's night lights grew 2.3× from 2012 to 2025, but Kutch's grew 3.1× and it went from Gujarat's 5th brightest district to 2nd. What do you think lit it up?
Explore 13 years of satellite night lights for every district on Spatial India.
Kota and Jhalawar share a border. In Kota, 76.5% of women can read. In Jhalawar, it is 54.3%.
Rajasthan ranks 34th of 36 states on women's literacy, but the state average hides a 22-point gap across one district line.
How does your district compare? spatialindia.com
Spatial India retweeted
The gas sits off the Mahanadi delta. In the delta districts, about 7 in 10 homes still cooked without clean fuel: Bhadrak 23% on clean fuel, Kendrapara 28%, Jagatsinghpur 31%.
Odisha overall is 35%, 4th lowest state. Local supply and city gas could move these numbers fast.
Mapped on @SpatialIndia using NFHS-5.
Nuh and Gurugram share a border.
Women with 10+ years of schooling: 14% in Nuh, 60% in Gurugram. (NFHS-5, 2019-21)
Is there a district border near you where the numbers change this sharply?
Explore your district data on @SpatialIndia
In Bihar, half of all pending cases in district courts are more than 5 years old.
In Punjab, it is about 1 in 20.
Same court system. The age of the backlog depends on the state.
District court data, NJDG, July 2024. Mapped on @SpatialIndia
India just had its best-ever July–September quarter for exports.
Across India, 1 in 4 registered MSMEs is a manufacturer. In Tiruppur and Surat it is nearly 1 in 2.
Surat alone has 2.7 lakh manufacturing MSMEs, the most of any district and nearly as many as all of Kerala.
Explore the live map on @SpatialIndia
Lakshadweep was declared fully literate this week. In 2019-21, NFHS-5 already found 96.5% of its women aged 15-49 literate.
In 744 of 777 districts, most women could read.
Where's the next milestone? The light patches: western MP and southern Odisha.
Find your district's number: spatialindia.com/app?layers=…
8 out of 10 Indian districts have 90%+ of households on an improved drinking water source.
In Bihar, all 38 do.
Sanitation is also catching up. 466 districts are past 70%, and every district in Kerala and Mizoram is above 90%.
In Lakhisarai, 56% of women aged 20–24 were married before they turned 18.
In Siwan, in the same state, the figure is 21%.
That is NFHS-5 (2019–21). In 22 of Bihar's 38 districts, at least 4 in 10 young women were married as children. The state average hides that spread. A district map shows it at a glance.
Making that map is usually the slow part: a boundary file, a join that breaks on renamed districts, a hand-built legend, and a source line you hope you remembered.
So we built Map Studio, now live. Pick any of our 90+ indicators, or upload your own spreadsheet with a district column, and get a finished map on Survey of India boundaries. The legend, title and source credit are already on it.
Templates for a paper, a policy brief, a news story or a slide. Outlines and callouts on the districts you want readers to see. Titles and labels in Hindi. Export as SVG, PNG or PDF.
It is free to use. The source credit stays on every export, so any reader can trace the number back.
If you work with district data: which map have you redrawn by hand most often?
Girls who stay in school marry later, and NFHS-5 shows it district by district.
Where under 30% of women finished 10 years of school, about 31% of young women married before 18.
Where half finished, it falls to 11%.
Mapped on Spatial India. #DayOfTheGirl
Explore your district on @SpatialIndia spatialindia.com/app?biv=nfh…
We are launching Map Studio 🎉
Making a map for your next paper, report or presentation shouldn't mean wrestling with GIS software.
Map Studio lets you create and customize publication-ready maps of India's public data in seconds with legends & source credits built in.
Try it: spatialindia.com/map-studio
We’re making India’s state & district data more visual.
Now you can visually explore key indicators district-by-district, directly on the map.
Explore your state on spatialindia.com/states
We took Indian Railways' 2024 track network and measured it district by district, as track per km². The bright band across the north is the Ganga plain. The darkest districts are in the north-eastern hills and the Himalaya, which is where India is building its newest lines.
ALT Spatial India district by district breakdown of india's rail network in 2024
In the 2024 GatiShakti snapshot, 74 Indian districts had railway tracks but 0 electrified km.
Railway electrification has moved rapidly since then under @AshwiniVaishnaw
Here’s what that last stretch looked like, district by district, on Spatial India.
Here's #population overlaid with highways, train routes, and stations, broken down by 800+ districts. More on @SpatialIndia
