Blog & Media

District gazetteers were detailed documentations of the districts by the British in colonial India. India continued the legacy of preparing gazetteers for its districts after independence, but in a rather sporadic manner. The dedicated state government gazetteer departments churned out few gazetteers but in infrequent cycles and there was no consistency among or within the states for doing this.

But how can we access these gazetteers? Well, some states kept an online repository of these documents on their websites accessible to general public for viewing or downloading. Some states have done a better job at this than the others. 

We examined this online footprint. Rummaging through each state gazetteer department’s website, exploring their gazetteers, examining which departments oversees the gazetteer publication work (if any), the sources of these gazetteers, whether they can be downloaded, and the frequency of their publication by state department. Based on this we evolved a category of how accessible gazetteers of a certain state is, online.

We make three categories:

Category 1:  States have a dedicated state department for making gazetteers and have made their gazetteers available online for anyone to download and read. Some states like Haryana and Odisha have latest gazetteers printed in 2020 for Jhajjar and Bhadrak respectively.

Category 2: States either do not have a dedicated state department, or even if they have allotted the task to some department, that department does not have any gazetteers on them. The colonial gazetteers of these states can be found on sources like Indian culture and D-Space library.

Category 3: States do not have a dedicated state department and their online versions of gazetteers are also sparsely populated on previously mentioned sites.

Title: Categories of Indian states based on accessibility of gazetteers.
Source: Author’s evaluation

We observe that many of the of ‘big’ states (twelve in number) fare poorly in preparation and management of gazetteers. This absence of state administration’s efforts towards making accessible district level information through gazetteers is disappointing. A larger concern in Category 3 states is regarding Tamil Nadu, a state with rich history and noteworthy policy designs does not have its gazetteers available online at all.

While the journey to document India is a long one, perhaps we should begin by bringing out whatever we already have, out in the open. That alone may be a useful starting point.