I Built an Open-Source Interactive Village Finder for India Using Official Government Data

I Built an Open-Source Interactive Village Finder for India Using Official Government Data

Finding accurate information about villages in India isn’t as straightforward as it should be.

Whether you’re a developer building a logistics platform, a researcher analysing demographic data, a government employee, or simply someone trying to locate a village, you’re often left navigating multiple government websites, downloading spreadsheets, or searching through outdated datasets.

I wanted to make that easier.

So I built India Village Finder, an open-source project that provides an interactive way to explore villages using official Government of India data.

🌐 Live Demo: https://mchittineni.github.io/india-village-finder/

📦 GitHub Repository: https://github.com/mchittineni/india-village-finder

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Why I Built It

The Government of India’s Local Government Directory (LGD) contains authoritative administrative data, but accessing and navigating it isn’t particularly developer-friendly.

I wanted to build something that:

• makes village information easy to search
• provides an interactive map instead of spreadsheets
• automatically stays up to date
• is completely open source
• can eventually cover every state in India

The goal wasn’t simply to display data—it was to build a maintainable data platform with automated updates, validation, testing, and deployment.

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Current Coverage

The current release supports:

• Andhra Pradesh
• Telangana
• Karnataka
• Tamil Nadu

Across these states, the project contains:

• 130 Districts
• 1,866 Mandals/Taluks
• Nearly 80,000 villages

All sourced from the official Local Government Directory (LGD).

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Features

The application includes:

✅ Interactive district and village maps

✅ Instant search

• Districts
• Mandals
• Taluks
• Villages
• PIN Codes

✅ Multiple language support

• English
• Telugu
• Kannada
• Tamil
• Hindi
• Urdu (RTL)

✅ Official native-language village names where available

✅ PIN code lookup

✅ Nearby civic services using OpenStreetMap

• Hospitals
• Police stations
• Government offices
• Fire stations
• Post offices

✅ Automatic data refresh pipeline

✅ Downloadable datasets

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Built with Open Data

One thing I wanted to ensure was that the project uses authoritative sources wherever possible.

The application combines data from:

• Government of India Local Government Directory (LGD)
• Government Open Data License (India)
• GeoNames
• OpenStreetMap
• Official LGD administrative boundaries

Every build is automatically validated against the live LGD portal before deployment.

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Engineering Highlights

Rather than manually maintaining datasets, the project includes an automated pipeline that:

• Downloads the latest LGD datasets
• Processes and normalises village data
• Generates JSON and CSV datasets
• Builds simplified map boundaries
• Runs automated validation tests
• Opens a Pull Request with a generated changelog
• Deploys automatically to GitHub Pages after approval

This keeps the published data current while ensuring every change is reviewed and tested.

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Tech Stack

The project is built using:

• Python
• JavaScript
• Leaflet
• Fuse.js
• GitHub Actions
• GitHub Pages
• GeoJSON
• OpenStreetMap
• LGD Open Data

The entire deployment pipeline is automated using GitHub Actions.

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Project Architecture

The repository is organised so that every state is independently deployable while sharing a common processing pipeline.

The scraper is responsible for:

• downloading data
• validation
• generating JSON
• building boundaries
• producing release artifacts

Each state contains its own standalone web application generated from the shared template.

This makes it easy to add additional states without duplicating code.

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What Makes This Different?

Many datasets simply publish CSV files.

This project goes further by providing:

• interactive visualisation
• multilingual support
• automated updates
• tested datasets
• downloadable releases
• reproducible build pipeline
• CI/CD
• open-source collaboration

It’s designed to be useful for both end users and developers.

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Roadmap

Some of the features I’m currently working on include:

• Support for all Indian states
• Public REST API
• Better village coordinate coverage
• Accessibility improvements
• Additional official language support
• Faster search
• Developer SDK

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Looking for Contributors

This project is completely open source, and I’d love community feedback.

There are many ways to contribute:

• Test the application
• Report bugs
• Suggest new features
• Improve documentation
• Add support for more states
• Improve map accuracy
• Submit Pull Requests

Even reporting a data issue is incredibly valuable.

You can open an issue here:

https://github.com/mchittineni/india-village-finder/issues

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Feedback Welcome

This project has been a great opportunity to work with open government data, geospatial processing, CI/CD automation, multilingual support, and modern web mapping.

If you have suggestions for improving the project—or if you’d like to contribute—I’d be delighted to hear from you.

If you find the project useful, consider giving it a ⭐ on GitHub. It helps others discover the project and encourages further development.

Happy coding!