Citizens can explore 300 GHMC wards on Hyderabad Urban Observatory platform
HYDERABAD: Marking a leap forward for urban transparency, Hyderabad Urban Labs has brought the city’s future into sharper focus by digitizing and unveiling the boundaries of the 300 newly proposed GHMC wards. Now, through the Hyderabad Urban Observatory platform, citizens can dive into an interactive map and discover Hyderabad’s evolving administrative landscape for themselves.
With just a few clicks, users can journey through every ward, circle, zone, and corporation boundary, piecing together a vivid digital mosaic of Hyderabad’s governance. The platform neatly organizes the city into three corporations, 12 zones, 60 circles, and 300 wards.
Speaking to HyerabadMail, Teja Malladi from Hyderabad Urban Labs explained that the initiative was born out of a practical need. “The primary idea of this is to bring everything together,” Malladi said in an interview with Hyderabad Mail. “We were doing a lot of teaching and capacity building on GIS skills, but people would often tell us there is no data they can use. We thought we should have a place where, even without learning technical skills, people can interact with data about their city.”
Malladi emphasized that this is an independent effort to digitize and consolidate information that is often scattered or difficult to access. “There has been no official release of this data in a usable digital format,” he clarified. The boundaries were digitized from images released in the public domain, such as those shared in news articles or on social media. The observatory aims to update the data as soon as the final, official boundaries are published by the government.
The Hyderabad Urban Observatory is meant to be more than just a ward map. It is a growing collection of location-based data, bringing together information from different places to give a complete view of the city. This includes things like master plans (often only found as PDFs), where public services like Anganwadi centers are located (from open data websites like Open Data Telangana), and even old maps of Hyderabad.
The goal is to allow citizens, researchers, and even government officials to analyze complex urban issues by looking at multiple datasets together. “You cannot look at heat-related risks separately from floods or urban development,” Malladi noted. “All of these are complex issues in a city. You have to bring them together and look at them.”
Interactive observatory map
One of the biggest challenges in creating the map has been the nature of the source material. Malladi explained the technical hurdles, “The map is often available as a low-quality image uploaded on social media. To use it in GIS formats, you have to spend hours to ‘georeference’ it first, which means aligning the image with real-world coordinates.” This process requires cross-referencing ward and circle numbers from various textual sources like tables and news reports.
Looking ahead, Hyderabad Urban Labs plans to make the data more accurate through an organized volunteer program. Instead of just asking anyone to help, the lab wants to train local volunteers from different wards in the city. “The idea is to create a set of skills and work together with citizen groups and NGOs,” Malladi explained. “If we have representation from at least 10% of these wards, we can have a verified, volunteer-based effort to collect and verify information.”
This volunteer network could be used to ground-truth existing data, such as confirming the exact locations of Anganwadi centers, or to document localized issues that often go unreported, like persistent waterlogging in specific areas. “Small, day-to-day events which are usually overlooked can be documented. This creates evidence for the future to work towards solutions,” Malladi said.
The Hyderabad Urban Observatory is a citizen-led effort to make the city’s data easier to find and understand. As Hyderabad keeps growing, tools like this are important for helping people stay informed and take part in discussions about their city’s future.
