Maharashtra’s private success story

In a unique passion project, a professor at Maharashtra’s FLAME University has taken the district gazetteer out of government offices and into the digital era.

Economist and professor Yugank Goyal launched the Districts Project during the Covid-19 pandemic and took on all 36 districts of Maharashtra. The project combines official data with locally sourced material and seeks to create an online hub for the state’s districts and talukas.

“The British wrote about us in great detail, although with a colonial lens and biases,” said Goyal, adding that while India has broad national data, for talukas and districts, detailed, granular information is entirely missing.

“Our project fills that vacuum and its strength lies in its participatory model, which can be scaled easily to districts outside Maharashtra,” he said.

A team of around 12 people built the platform, dividing information into two broad categories: culture and statistics. The cultural section includes architecture, art forms, cultural sites, festivals, food, language, markets, stories, and sports. The statistics section covers agriculture, education, environment, industry, elections, health, and revenue.

Goyal’s team collated official data from district administrations, while cultural material was gathered through fieldwork. In 2024, FLAME University also launched a three-month district fellowship programme for the documentation of district-level statistics and cultures.

"It is going to be ever-enriching when more and more stories come to us. We connected our project with the citizen, which was missing in the old system of gazetteers. We selected students from Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas and local colleges in each district and engaged them on the ground, calling them District Fellows,” said Goyal, adding that these students bring in stories rooted in local experience. It’s an all-new cache of hidden stories for India.

The Dhule district page, for instance, includes a profile of Amali village, known for its Vishnu temple and the Kanhaiyalal Mandir, as well as an account of freedom fighter Janardhan Sakharam Vispute.

“Janardhan once had the honour of sharing a coach with Mahatma Gandhi while travelling from Surat to Bhusawal. Gandhi advised him to boycott foreign goods, and Janardhan was moved by the great leader’s remarks. He also met Balubhai Mehta and worked as a clerk for Ghanshyam Laxmidas, a Gujarati lawyer,” reads the website. 

Goyal said the cultural sections are crowd-sourced and open to edits.

“It is going to be ever-enriching when more and more stories come to us. We connected our project with the citizen, which was missing in the old system of gazetteers,” he said. Statistical data, he added, is acquired from district statistical offices and then made intelligible and digitised.

Goyal’s interest in this area started around 2016, when he was associated with OP Jindal Global University and worked on a Karnal gazetteer. It was never published but working with the old documents sparked a realisation in him.

“That’s when I understood how important local information is,” he said. “Then I started full-fledged work in Maharashtra.”

The project, though housed at FLAME University, is funded by Vallabh Bhanshali, co-founder of the ENAM Group, and Monik Koticha, managing director of Fortress Group.

On 1 December, Chief Economic Adviser, V Anantha Nageswaran launched the project in Pune.

“The Districts Project represents a powerful step towards strengthening India’s development discourse through localised, ground-level understanding,” he said.

What began as a campus-based experiment is now turning into a small movement in Maharashtra. In August 2024, FLAME University hosted a national seminar titled Gazetteers: Past, Present and Future and signed an MoU with Maharashtra’s Gazetteer Department to pursue joint research.

Earlier that year, Goyal took the project to a wider audience at a TEDx event, speaking on colonial gazetteers and the representation of Indians as “dirty and dishonest” in a talk titled Colonial Gazetteers of India: Stereotyping a Nation.

Goyal’s endeavour has even grabbed the attention of national policy advisors.  Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC-PM), praised not just the Moradabad project but Goyal’s efforts, noting how colonial administrators once took “a lot of trouble to document Indian districts in detail.”

"To be fair to colonial-era administrators, they took a lot of trouble to document Indian districts in detail — their histories, cultures, statistics. This is still interesting to read. So, am happy that there is now an effort to revive this tradition," he said.

Shamika Ravi, also a member of the EAC-PM, called such local data a “critical resource” for precision policy-making and said she hoped the model would scale beyond Maharashtra.

She said, "I remember discussing this idea with Prof. Yugank Goyal 3 years ago. Thrilled to see the outcome! As we move towards precision policymaking, this type of local data becomes a critical resource. Hope to see this scaled beyond the districts of Maharashtra."

This article has valuable insights of Prof. Yugank Goyal, Faculty of Public Policy, FLAME University.