Looking for Village-Level Shapefiles (or Raw data) for India

[Smriti Mittal]

I’ve been digging through the DataMeet Google Group archives and other open data forums to find village-level shapefiles for India, but haven’t had much luck so far. Also came across bhuvan's WMS layers (no underlying geometry, could not find any working WMS yet) and WFS endpoints (could not get this one as well working).

1) I’m not necessarily looking for ready-to-use shapefiles. Even if there are raw or obscure sources - things that need scraping, conversion, or heavy lifting, I’m absolutely fine with that. I’d just be grateful for any direction. I WANT to do the heavy lifting!

2) I’d also love to understand how do you go about cleaning and processing the data you would have used for a state. If there’s any public data worth working with (even if messy), I’m keen to learn how you approach it and try replicating the process for other states

[sreeram kandimalla]

1) Most of the lifting for the scraping part is done.  Shapefile equivalents are here - https://github.com/ramSeraph/indian_admin_boundaries

2) This is the actual heavy lifting.. Do publish if you manage to create a process. Also.. depends on why you want to use the data for, I would suggest looking at https://devdatalab.org/shrug where the heavy lifting till 2011 was handled. Some of the tools  ( https://github.com/paulnov/masala-merge ) created by those folks might also be useful for cleaning elsewhere as well.

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[Nikhil VJ]

Hi Smriti,

If I go to Survey of India official site: https://onlinemaps.surveyofindia.gov.in/

Then click on the "Village Boundaries" section in the top row,

Then I see a listing for a geodatabase and a shapefile, at price Rs.0. (free)

Can you try that out and let us all know if what you get from there is good-to-go ?

Note: Might be in a different CRS; you can convert it in QGIS to EPSG:4326 to get things in latitude-longitude numbers. (quick way: Export/Save As.. use the CRS dropdown) 

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Cheers,
Nikhil VJ
https://nikhilvj.co.in

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[Smriti Mittal]

Thank you Sreeram.

I had a few initial questions about the villages release you shared -
https://github.com/ramSeraph/indian_admin_boundaries/releases/tag/villages 

I was curious about the sources listed there - are these the actual origins of the data? If so, why are they not WFS servers or links directly referencing your Python library that can pull data from such endpoints?

Or is it that you’ve used your library to extract the data from those WFS servers, and the links listed are simply the underlying source references?

Also, when I tried following some of those source links, I couldn’t find any raw data or shapefiles, at least not directly. So I was wondering what's the intention behind listing those particular links as sources?

Just trying to understand all this better ...

On Tue, Jul 8, 2025 at 9:13 AM sreeram kandimalla <kandimall...@gmail.com> wrote:

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Smriti

[Smriti Mittal]

Thanks, Nikhil! I signed up on the website and my account got approved today. For the past couple of days, it was showing a price of 0/-, but now after completing the registration, it's showing 6900/-, maybe because of the type of account I ended up creating?  

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Smriti

[sreeram kandimalla]

There was a gap between the date the data was pulled and published. In the mean time I forget some and was too tired to go back and figure out exactly which layer I pulled it from. 

The bhuvanpanchayat3 village boundaries were pulled from the graphql api visible on the website. The code for it is here - https://github.com/ramSeraph/staging_opendata/tree/main/maps/bhuvan_panchayat3

The JK ones were definitely pulled recently from one of the various endpoints available from Bhuvan.. I have lost track. This was the only place the WMS extraction tool was used. 

The SOI ones were pulled using the code here - https://github.com/ramSeraph/opendata/blob/master/maps/SOI/scrape_villages.py

Looks like some of the other linked urls are not longer accessible. Nothing can be done about that. When they were accessible they were pulled using pyesridump

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[prashant kumar]

The data is available in Shapefile and Geodatabase formats in Survey of India (SOI) Website.

Web Link for Survey of India Online Maps: https://onlinemaps.surveyofindia.gov.in/

On Tue, Jul 8, 2025 at 9:13 AM sreeram kandimalla <kandimall...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Hello from NGOMIS]

I have submitted the request and approved and am able to download at free of charge. Are some states, especially Northeast states databases, excluded from Village Boundary Databases?

Best regards,

Atanu from NGO/MIS

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