Geography reference
Indian districts
The unit India's best data is published at. The National Family Health Survey, most scheme monitoring and a great deal of state statistics are district-wise — and a district map is the one an analyst usually cannot make, because the district names in the data and the district names on the map have drifted apart.
The 14 districts of Kerala, drawn from the exact boundaries Vizzie joins your data to — not a picture of them.
How the names are matched
As with states, the key is the name: Indian data carries an LGD district code, no open
boundary source carries one, so there is nothing to join a code to. Matching folds
diacritics, case and punctuation, so Chhindwāra and Chhindwara are
the same district.
The renames are the real problem, and they are not spelling. Karnataka renamed Bangalore to Bengaluru, Bellary to Ballari and Belgaum to Belagavi; Uttar Pradesh renamed Faizabad to Ayodhya; Maharashtra renamed Ahmednagar to Ahilyanagar. These are different words, not different transliterations, and no normaliser will reconcile them. On top of that, states create districts constantly — several dozen since 2021 — and a district that did not exist when the boundaries were drawn has nowhere to land.
Measured against the National Family Health Survey's district file, 605 of its 718 districts match — 84.3%. Vizzie reports that as a partial match rather than drawing a map with silent holes in it.
What it rolls up into
- Village or ward
- Sub-district (tehsil, taluk, block)
- District
- State or union territory
- India
Which years exist
Districts are not a census-cycle geography the way tracts or LSOAs are — a state can create one at any time, by notification, and several do most years. There is no national vintage to hold on to.
The two dates on this page are both real and they are not the same. The boundaries were published in 2023, which is the vintage above; the districts they draw are India's as of 2021, which is what governs whether your data matches. Two consequences worth knowing before you map: districts created since 2021 will not match, and seven district names repeat across states (Aurangabad, Bilaspur, Hamirpur, Pratapgarh among them) so those arrive as a single merged area rather than two. Where a dataset carries the state alongside the district, that context is the way to tell them apart.
Map a spreadsheet of these
Paste a column of district names into Vizzie with whatever you measured beside it. Vizzie recognises the names, joins them to the boundaries above and draws the map — no shapefile, no download, no GIS install.
Boundaries: geoBoundaries (gbOpen) ADM2 for India — Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0. Share-alike: adapted boundary data must be shared under the same terms.
Licence: ODbL-1.0. Source: geoBoundaries.
Boundary counts and sizes measured from the data Vizzie holds, 2026-09-19.