Geography reference

Indian states and union territories

The level almost every Indian dataset can be rolled up to. Census tables, NFHS rounds, MoSPI's survey releases and most ministry publications are published state-wise, and they identify the state by its name rather than by any code — which is exactly why a spreadsheet of Indian states is easy to read and hard to map.

The 36 states and union territories of India, drawn from the exact boundaries Vizzie joins your data to — not a picture of them.

How the names are matched

There is no code here, and that is deliberate. India's own identifier for a state is its LGD code — 32 is Kerala, 27 is Maharashtra — and no openly licensed boundary file carries LGD codes at all. The other candidate, ISO 3166-2 (IN-KL), is carried by the boundaries but written by almost no Indian publisher. So the key is the name, and the ISO code rides along as an attribute for anyone who has it.

Spelling is the thing that would normally break a name join, and here it does not. Transliteration varies — Mahārāshtra, Maharastra, Maharashtra; Tamil Nādu against Tamil Nadu — so the match folds diacritics, case and punctuation before comparing. A column written either way lands on the same state.

One real miss is worth naming: Delhi is published as NCT of Delhi by several national sources and as Delhi in the boundary set, and those are not the same string. It is the single state-level mismatch in the national health survey.

What it rolls up into

1. Village or ward — the smallest unit LGD numbers
2. Sub-district (tehsil, taluk, block)
3. District
4. State or union territory
5. India

Which years exist

India's first-level map has changed three times in a decade, and a boundary file older than the change is simply wrong: Telangana was separated from Andhra Pradesh in 2014, Jammu and Kashmir was reorganised into two union territories in 2019, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli was merged with Daman and Diu in 2020.

Vizzie holds the current 36, including Ladakh and the merged union territory — so a dataset published before 2014 will report Telangana's districts against Andhra Pradesh, which is what the source said at the time rather than an error in the join.

Map a spreadsheet of these

Paste a column of state 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.

Open Vizzie

Boundaries: geoBoundaries (gbOpen) ADM1 for India, built from DataMeet — Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 India.
Licence: CC-BY-2.5-IN. Source: geoBoundaries, from DataMeet. Boundary counts and sizes measured from the data Vizzie holds, 2026-09-19.