Back in July 2022, I started mapping schools in Chandigarh. Now that I’m thinking, it wasn’t mapping schools (Oberaffe had already marked areas and added amenity=school tags a decade earlier) but adding names and a bunch of other information tags to those. It was a fun little activity which lead, in my estimate, touching of all schools (and a bunch of colleges as well), which numbered ~200 in Chandigarh and periphery. Areas where I had issues adding data have been populated with fixme tags for in area mappers to help out. Most of the data has flowed to downstream applications like OSMand and Organic maps, which look nice and full now, just like all the yellow areas on standard map.

On to the next adventure, to mark schools (and colleges) in Panchkula; Chandigarh’s next door neighbor.

Chandigarh is a planned city here in north India. Since being well flocked by mappers and easy (fun) grid layout of roads, most of the areas are already mapped here. Last month, I came to the realization that many schools and colleges weren’t exactly mapped here.

There are a total of 115 government schools in Chandigarh (Primary-8, Middle-13, High School-53, Senior Secondary-40), seven aided schools, 37 recognized Senior Secondary private schools, 19 recognized private High Schools, 13 recognized private Middle Schools, 6 recognized private primary schools, and 3 recognized private play schools.

From - List of schools in Chandigarh - Wikipedia

The Wikipedia entry told me that there were quite a lot of work to be done, so I got to work. Got a todo list from Department of Education, Chandigarh Administration’s website. [1][2][3] I came to the realization vast majorities of school areas were already mapped and marked amenities=school some 9-10 years ago by Oberaffe, just that those lacked associated names and information of the institutions. Now getting the sector from DoE’s website and location from https://chandigarh.gov.in/know-chandigarh/map and referencing from Bharat Maps (which, by the way have surprisingly good mapping of schools), got me mapping. I just search for the school’s website and Wikipedia page, if it exists, and usually add the following tags -

• name
• name:en
• alt_name
• alt_name_1 (sometimes alt_name_2 also)
• amenity
• operator - usually educational societies
• religion
• website
• phone
• email
• fax - weirdly, some schools still advertise them
• grades - using 0-12 format where 0 signify pre-school - nursery/LKG/UKG
• addr:postcode
• addr:city
• wikidata
• wikipedia
• source - which is usually website

School websites carry almost all this information. It seems a document called mandatory public disclosure is being mandated as all school websites carry them which help in quick data searching. Sample PDF from Carmel Convent School. Some schools advertise more than one telephones, emails, but not able to find tags to add more than one of them.

Lot of work still needs to be done, and sometimes it’s slow and boring, but it feels good seeing school names pop-up on OSM so the natural satisfaction follows :)

Links

1. Recognized private schools - http://www.chdeducation.gov.in/?q=node/8
2. Government schools - http://www.chdeducation.gov.in/?q=node/66
3. Government aided schools - http://www.chdeducation.gov.in/?q=node/7