I was recently reading Demographic deposit, dividend and debt by Sonalde Desai. Following the Standard Operating Procedure, I looked up this Sonalde person and turns out she is a researcher at a research institute in Delhi called National Council of Applied Economic Research. The work of this organization felt interesting to me, so I had to pause my studies and see its location on OpenStreetMap.

Nothing. Looks like the place hasn’t been mapped yet. I searched for 11, Indraprastha Estate since that was mentioned on their contact page and this time I did find an object. A person called “n’garh” had added the address back in July 2014 and I am so glad that I was quickly able to push a changeset (#180878526). Another win for address mapping!

This post was first released on my website with 💜 under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

OK. Last year I wrote a short guide on mapping Indian addresses but I lost it in my tiny pursuit to delete myself. Today I suddenly came across the fact that the guide was actually used by mappers and, hence, as a result I am now writing this post to become a replacement for that old guide. Since this is a new one, I don’t want to just rehash the old stuff and instead this time I am going to take a simple problem and show how I would solve it from scratch.

A1, Tower 2, Sector 11, RK Puram, South West District, Delhi, India

A problem very similar to this one came up in OSM India’s XMPP channel today. So, how does one go about mapping this address?

As it’s usually the case we can ignore the district, state, and country part as they are all very well mapped in India. This leaves us with everything upto RK Puram.

If you are thinking that something as big as RK Puram should surely be already on the map then you are wrong; In my “career” I have actually seen larger areas without any nodes for them. So we will in fact check if it’s already on the map and, guess what, it actually is already mapped as a suburb, so that’s one less step for us! I should mention that in OSM there are three “neighbourhood” levels below the district: quarter, suburb, and neighbourhood in decreasing order of size. In most cases suburb and neighbourhood should be enough for you, but it is important to be aware of quarter for special situations.

Now let’s check for Sector 11. As of writing this, Sector 11 isn’t on the map. So I will put a neighbourhood node at the approximate centre of Sector 11. (Remember that neighbourhood is smaller than suburb.) We are making good progress.

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