Andhra Pradesh/SotM

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< Work in Progress: Please feel free edit sections of your interest>

State of the Map Andhra Pradesh - 2025

Showing state of Andhra Pradesh in India circa 2014
Andhra Pradesh outline on OSM Change from 2013-2025, with OSM tiles as of 2025,OT query for the first clean version

Andhra Pradesh as a state was formed in 1956 by merger of Andhra state, which itself was formed in 1953 by bifurcating Madras state with Telangana part of Hyderabad State. In 2014, it got bifurcated and became the state of Andhra of 1953, with minor deviations. Though OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004, early attempts at promoting it in India refer to 2007 efforts of Indian mapper Arun in Chennai.[1] [2] During the 2010 Wiki conference in Mumbai, the OSM became to known wider section of volunteer Wikipedians. Around 2011, Railway lines were starting to be mapped.

Like the foreigners who took up the cause of Indian languages in 19th century, few foreign volunteers initially contributed to mapping India on OpenStreetMap. The initial clean boundary of Andhra Pradesh was made on 7 October 2013. As part of India level mapping, national highways in Andhra Pradesh were initiated around 2017. While efforts to map villages might have started earlier, large scale mapping picked up speed in 2019 with the availability of Bhuvan. Towards close of 2019, language activity in OSM got a major push with the release of mandalas with Telugu labels of Andhra Pradesh.[3]

Launch of Interactive Wikimedia maps in 2018 helped increase the activity on OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia.[4] On 15 February 2021, the Government of India announced changes to the country's mapping policy which frees up lot of earlier restrictions related to mapping.[5] In 2024, addition of Telugu labels with simultaneous wikidata/wikipedia id's helped improve the mapping accuracy as part of Coordinate Me 2024 contest.[6] In 2025, additional focus on quality assurance using PMGSY data, helped improve the count of villages with wikidata, Telugu name to about 13000, which is close to the number of gram panchayats or revenue villages.

Apart from these individual contributions, team based efforts also contributed to map making in Andhra Pradesh. Notable among these were RMSI team contribution of health care facilities data. Coordinate Me 2024 contest, mapping by Ola and Amazon teams apart from some HOT teams. This State of the Map (SotM) country presentation highlights the progress, community, and specific use cases of OpenStreetMap (OSM) within Andhra Pradesh usually focusing on community growth, mapping data challenges, and local initiatives. As this is the first report of its kind, India level initiatives are also mentioned, before the state level initiatives to give context.

Community Status

Overview of active contributors, local user groups, and community engagement activities (e.g., workshops, mapathons).

Apart from individual contributors, several organised editing teams from private sector (Ola, Apple, and non profit (HOTOSM, example project fpr Andhra Pradesh 2024 floods) contribute to mapping.

Community events

First India/Bangalore community meetup happened in 2008 at IIM, Bangalore.[7] First mapathon to develop community happened in Bangalore in March 2015. SoTA asia happened in Bangalore, India durng 17-18 November 2018.[8]

Community events
Title Type Date Organisers Participants Place Links
OSM on Mobile workshop with OsmAnd at ANITS Vizag Educational Session and Field Mapping 2015-06-16 OSGeo India, Swecha 200 ANITS Engineering College, Visakhapatnam post
Workshop and field mapping with OsmAnd and ODK Educational Session and Field Mapping 2017-02-27 OSGeo India, Swecha 60 Andhra University, Visakhapatnam post
OSM intro and hands on mapping activity during Freedom Fest at MVGR College 2019 Educational Session 2019-09-22 MVGR GLUG, Swecha AP 50 MVGR Engineering College, Vizianagaram
Mapathon at PVP Siddhartha and KL Universities Educational Session 2024-02-07 Swecha AP 100+ students Vijayawada
OSM Vizag Mapping Party Mapping Party 2024-02-11 Swecha AP 10 Central Park, Vizag
An online session on introducing OpenStreetMap to Wikipedians Educational Session 2024-06-30 SaiPhani, Arjunaraoc 8 Online Event page, Recording, Slides.
An online event to educate Wikipedians about Wikimedia maps and contributing to OSM Educational Session 2024-07-07 Arjunaraoc, Sai 7 Online [9][10]
KL University, Vijayawada OSM 20th Anniversary Mapping Party Mapping Party 2024-08-09 KL GLUG, Swecha AP 15 KL University GLUG, Vijayawada Photos
Bangalore community Informal/Lunch meetup 2024-?? Bangalore community 8? Hotel in Bangalore
FOSS conference Conference stall 2025-?? Bangalore Conf venue

Data Highlights

Andhra Pradesh map activity on OpenStreetMap
Andhra Pradesh map activity growth on OpenStreetMap

Some samples from OSMAND packaging of OSM Andhra Pradesh data (Maps, Roads,POI, transport, address) in compressed file format(.obf.zip), utilising the archived pages of OsmAnd downloads page are given below.

Table: OsmAND packaging of OSM for Andhra Pradesh
timestamp Size_MB
2015-07-25 9.5
2015-11-04 10.3
2016-05-01 15.3
2016-08-01 17.0
2016-10-01 17.4
2017-02-01 18.0
2017-05-01 20.2
2017-08-01 21.3
2017-11-01 22.8
2018-02-01 24.4
2018-05-01 29.6
2018-08-01 32.7
2019-02-01 35.7
2019-05-01 39.6
2019-07-01 40.0
2019-11-01 42.6
2020-02-01 44.3
2020-04-01 45.9
2020-07-01 50.0
2020-11-01 64.1
2021-02-01 68.1
2021-04-01 68.4
2021-11-01 69.2
2022-05-01 70.5
2022-08-01 71.8
2022-11-01 80.4
2023-02-01 72.9
2023-08-01 76.0
2024-02-01 84.0
2024-05-01 91.6
2024-11-01 105.1
2025-02-01 110.3
2025-04-01 112.3
2025-08-01 115.0
2025-11-01 126.3
Statistics on data coverage, improvements in specific regions, or key data sets added.

Place Mapping

Place mapping primarily done in 2018-2019 by user:adivik2000 and few other mappers using Bhuvan data (Github repo for cleaning up Bhuvan data before upload)

Boundaries

Administrative Boundaries

Districts, Subdistricts mapped using SOI, Bharat maps as main resources and Census 2011 maps as secondary resources by User:Heinz_V in 2019. There is maintenance required. Check the osmwiki pages and also "Check notes by Heinz for improving the boundaries and the discussion"

Political Boundaries

Public Transportation

Roadways

Total road (Primary/Secondary/Other roads) length= 133000 km [11]

ola, Amazon and few other companies contribute data on roadways through their Organised editing projects

National and State Highways:

Extract from National highways: (OT query for map) (OT query for length (need to compute manually from the results as the difference of two lengths that are shown)

State, or Union territory length (km)
No Code Name in Morth
Annual report 2024/25 		in Morth
Annual report 2022/23 		mapped in
OSM [May 2025]
1 AP Andhra Pradesh 8,683 8207 7783
  • Length(km): 7296.83 (as of 27 Dec 2025) (Suspect some vandalism/inadvertent changes to tags between May and Dec 2025)


  • Total road length (not center line length) of trunk,primary, secondary highways): number of ways: 32243, Road length(km):51897 (OT query)


  • Bus stations:1834/X (1792 nodes, 42 ways, 0 relations) (OT query)

Railways

Railway mapping is done as part of India wide mapping starting. From 2010, satellite images are being used for mapping.

Airports

  • Airports:14/X (803 nodes, 12 ways, 2 relations) (OT query)

Water resources and waterways

Amenities

The distribution of different amenities by district is shown in the gallery below. for details see the subpages.

Ap-amenities-on-openstreetmap

Shop mapping is more prominent around the top urban centres namely Visakhapatnam and Vijayawada-Guntur areas. Hospital mapping is broad broadly distributed, as half of the data is an import. Pond mapping is more in districts around Visakhapatnam.


Amenity map types on OSM for Andhra Pradesh as on December 2025

A sample of different amenities and their map representations, total counts as of December 2025 given below. It can be seen from the enclosed figure that most ponds are mapped as ways and most fuel, hospital and shops are mapped as nodes. Government offices and schools have a mix of nodes, ways.

Amenity Node Way Total Count as of December 2025
Fuel 1091 91 1182
Hospital 4202 146 4348
School 691 607 1298
Government Office 278 127 405
Shop 5110 472 5582
Pond 22 20892 20914

According to google search results, the count of petrol pump(fuel) is 4441, number of schools is around 60000, and Hospitals number around 10000. So the present level of mapping for fuel stations is 26%, and for schools it is 2% and for hospitals it is about 4%. Fuel station mapping is high primarily because of import from PMGSY facilities data and concerted efforts of couple of users.

Detailed analysis for hospital amenity was done to understand the nature of data and its contributors. Only 8 users are found to be active for 3 or more years out of 16 years. There were 367 users in total who contributed. Several objects need correction in name. Only 25% of objects had seen at least one revision. For the top 80% of user contributions, 7 contributors had a share of 66% were part of import team coordinated by RMSI,[12], while 11 were general contributors accounting for 14%. Import project team had a significant contribution, though it operated mostly for 1-2 years.

Land use

Special interest mapping

Integration with other open platforms

For localisation of names and additional info about map objects

Wikidata

Name tag usage

Mapping resources

Maintenance

Physical world undergoes change every minute. Thus the map can never be complete and accurate. All the map data requires a continuous maintenance. Major maintenance of administrative boundaries for Andhra Pradesh were done following the bifurcation in 2014, reorganisation of districts in 2022. Minor maintenance like broken boundaries/ inadvertenty deleted objects need to be taken up atleast on an yearly basis. Tools like Osmcha, result-maps suite can help in following the map changes and also fixing errors introduced during mapping.

Quality Assessment

Academic assessment of OSM for Andhra Pradesh was not observed. Evidence of academic work related to India began to emerge in 2016. [13]

Uses

Wikipedia/Wikidata

  • Video demonstrating use of Wikimedia maps in Telugu Wikipedia village articles. ( Video duration 00:01:12, Audio:Telugu)
  • Prakasam district places in Telugu
    Prakasam district places in Telugu
  • A mandal map from OpenStreetMap depicted in Telugu Wikipedia (Initiated Circa 2019)
    A mandal map from OpenStreetMap depicted in Telugu Wikipedia (Initiated Circa 2019)

A prominent use of OSM maps is on Telugu and English Wikipedia as a way to illustrate geographical articles to the level of mandals initiated in 2019. With the availability of Wikimedia Maps utilising OSM, more details of OSM were presented on article pages. In 2024, readers are able to interactively explore OSM via Telugu Wikipedia from most administrative geographical articles.


Bus tracking apps

APSRTC Live Track

The live tracking service by APSRTC (apsrtclivetrack.com) uses OSM data via Carto's basemap. The live tracking service is also available on Android and iOS apps. The agency which developed this has also worked directly on OSM data by adding bus stops, depots, and residential areas although with severe inconsistencies. There were also instances of changing highway tags.

Research

Projects

Examples of how local OSM data is used for disaster management (floods/landslides), transportation, or humanitarian efforts.

Challenges & Solutions

Discussion on mapping challenges (e.g., naming inconsistencies) and how the community addresses them.
  • Most active mappers are only in single digit range. To increase their share, new contributors need to get feedback on their initial edits. Welcome message was tried with Welcome_tool and Osmcha. Rather than a generic welcome, engaging the new contributors through Osmcha with review comments and invitation to join OSM andhra telegram channel and also participate on OSM wiki might be more helpful. Active users have to spend part of their time on this activity.
  • More blogging through user diaries.
  • Monthly mapathons in places like Bangalore have been successful in building community. Similar activity in Vizag, Vijayawada/Guntur could be helpful.
  • In addition, online events on mapping topics need to happen more frequently to engage the new users.
  • Awareness of OpenStreetMap needs to be increased among the youth pursuing education and the utility of this data should get more visibility in press through projects such as flood mapping or other public service requirements.
  • Academic institutions engaged in GIS should make an attempt to utilise data from OSM (for example National highways data could be as good as any commercial or state government source) for their research.
  • Data sources even from government are not still available under OGDL, after the initial push in 2022. Interacting with state level policy officials could be helpful.
  • User level data, discussion analysis is only available at country (India) level from Pascal Neis tools (Example: osmstats. As India is a subcontinent, data availability on a India state basis would be useful to understand the community and increase interaction.
  • Annual offline event titled State of the Map - Andhra Pradesh is needed to bring together stakeholders.
  • Wide variety of tools with their own intricate query languages/ user interfaces make it difficult for contributors. AI tools could be used to get help in the form of Q&A to improve the productivity
  • Amenity data maintenance with regard to name typos, tag changes need more attention. It can be easily done using Level0 editor plugin like Comfort0 of JOSM
  • Duplicate mapping of objects: Needs countering with use of unique third party identifiers like Wikidata/ government_id. Need more tools to resolve these quickly.

Future Roadmap

Goals for increasing mapping coverage, improving data quality, and expanding the user base.

Acknowledgements

Contributors to this article:User:Arjunaraoc,User:Ph4ni <edit this article and add your username>

Resources used for this article

References

  1. ↑ “Jinal Foflia, India, SotM-Asia 2017 , Country Presentation”. 
  2. ↑ Arun Ganesh (29 April 20210). “Mapping a new way forward for Openstreetmap in India”. 
  3. ↑ “తెలుగు_పేర్లతో_ఆంధ్రప్రదేశ్_మండలాల_సమగ్ర_భౌగోళిక_గతిశీల_పటము_విడుదల”. 2019-11-09. 
  4. ↑ Joe Matazzoni (2018-06-28). “Interactive maps, now in your language”. 
  5. ↑ Chaudhary, Swapnil (2021-02-17). “New mapping policy” (in en). Retrieved 2021-07-05. 
  6. ↑ “Coordinate_Me_2024_లో_పాల్గొనండి,_బహుమతులు_గెల్చుకోండి”. 2024-04-28. 
  7. ↑ “State of the Map Asia 2018 - Day 1 - Inauguration Youtube recording”. 2 March 2019. 
  8. ↑ “IIMB, OpenStreetMap India, and Centre for Internet and Society host ‘State of the Map Asia 2018’ Conference”. 19 November 2018. 
  9. ↑ “Maps in Telugu Wikipedia - An Introduction; వికీపీడియాలో మ్యాపులు - ఒక పరిచయం , Youtube recording”. 
  10. ↑ “Slide deck for " Maps in Telugu Wikipedia - An Introduction; వికీపీడియాలో మ్యాపులు - ఒక పరిచయం"”. 
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Panchayat Raj department (9 Oct 2018). “Andhra Pradesh Rural Roads Project _ Project 000063”. 
  12. ↑ “Our Experience working with Health Facilities Import -India”. 3 March 2020. 
  13. ↑ Sukhjit Sehra et.al (2016-01-01). “Analysing OpenStreetMap data for topological errors”. 
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