IDFC Institute and the Urban Expansion Observatory have developed a new web-mapping tool that allows users to explore the spatial extent of India's urban growth across four decades. Users can visualise urban settlements, population clusters, built-up area and night-time lights going as far back as 1975. We hope this type of data provokes more informed debate around the level, trends and regional distribution of urbanisation in India, regional planning for urban growth and investments in public infrastructure such as transportation networks. The tools we are developing have been created entirely using public datasets, open-source tools and all our scripts, processed datasets and methodologies are shared publicly. We hope other researchers can use this type of data to build further on understanding the nature of urbanisation in India better. Any feedback for improvements is most welcome!
Explore the tool here: http://www.idfcinstitute