Mapping schools in Chandigarh OpenStreetMap diary

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 :)

Mapping schools in Chandigarh

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