An Introduction to my hometown, Chandannagar
Chandannagar is a quiet and beautiful town situated by the banks of the Hooghly River 35kms north of Kolkata. Established as a French colony in 1673, the city became a permanent French settlement in 1688, and more than two thousand brick houses were erected in the town around 1730 and a considerable maritime trade was carried on. For a time, it was the main center for European commerce in Bengal. Inspite of India becoming independent of Britain on 15 August 1947, Chandannagar was ceded to India by the French only on 2 February 1951. Owing to its glorious past, the town is decked with various places of tourist interest and many elegant residences along the riverbank.
Chandannagar Strand
Picture taken by Pratyush Sengupta
French Museum
Picture taken by Rangan Datta
Mapping Chandannagar on OpenStreetMap
Being born and brought up in Chandannagar, certainly it was the first place I wanted to map! Here is how it looked in OSM before:

Other than a handful of important roads, it was almost empty. I began by adding details within my neighborhood and went on to mapping all tourist attractions, missing roads and streets, schools, universities, post-office, police station, shops, restaurants, bus-stops, hospitals, nursing homes, religious places and other local amenities. The OpenStreetMap Map-Features Wiki and the presets came in handy for the purpose of correctly tagging the features that were added to the map.
Once done, this is how Chandannagar appeared on OSM:

Designing and Building a Multilingual Interactive Guide Map of Chandannagar
After adding most of the details to Chandannagar on OpenStreetMap, I wanted to make something useful for people visiting the place for the first time (like a tourist guide map). For this purpose of designing and building a Multilingual Interactive Guide Map of Chandannagar, this guide from the Mapbox toolkit proved to be very helpful. Also, Bengali translations have been added for all the POIs displayed in the application.
Below is a screenshot of the web application:

Going Forward
In the future, I plan on going for a field survey trip with my friends while I’m at my hometown so as to create the most detailed map of my hometown on OpenStreetMap, also introducing my friends to OSM in the process.