How every Bharat DN city guide is built
Bharat DN publishes one page per Indian city or town. Each page combines official census demographics, live environment data and locally specific editorial content — hidden places, food, markets, festivals, getaways — written for that exact town. This page documents exactly where every number comes from and how it is checked.
Data sources
Census of India 2011 (demographics)
Population, district population, literacy, district literacy, sex ratio, urban agglomeration figures and pincode/STD/railway data come from the Census of India 2011 tables and their widely used republications (census2011.co.in district and town tables, Wikipedia city infoboxes and the "Urban agglomerations in India" list). Where a municipal count differs from an agglomeration count, the page says which one is shown.
Open-Meteo (live weather + air quality)
The weather and US-AQI cards on every city page are refreshed every four hours from Open-Meteo's free forecast and air-quality APIs, using the city's coordinates. The "Updated … IST" stamp on each page shows the last refresh.
GeoNames (town discovery)
India's town universe — which towns exist, where they are, their approximate population — is drawn from GeoNames (CC-BY 4.0), which we use to plan coverage down to district towns. GeoNames estimates are planning data only: every published demographic figure is separately verified against Census 2011 tables.
Wikimedia Pageviews (priority ranking)
Public interest, measured by Wikipedia pageviews, helps decide which cities get authored first. It never touches published facts.
Verification gates
Before any city page is published it must pass an automated gate that checks, among other rules:
- Fact-table integrity — every facts row present, census-grade values in the right fields, uncertain figures marked honestly (≈ and a note) instead of silently guessed.
- Structural completeness — minimum row counts for places, industries, restaurants, festivals and FAQ; JSON-LD structured data for Article, BreadcrumbList and FAQPage must all render.
- Encoding and corruption scans — no broken markup, no foreign-script leakage, no encoding artifacts.
- Render-length floor — pages that are too thin to be useful are rejected outright.
New guides are drafted with the help of an automated multi-model pipeline, then pushed through the same gates — a draft only becomes a page if it is structurally perfect and every uncertain number is flagged. Figures we could not verify to census grade are shown as approximations in the page's fact notes until they are cross-checked.
Update cadence
- Weather + AQI: every 4 hours, automatic.
- New city guides: continuously — the queue currently holds thousands of towns being worked through in population-importance order.
- Census figures: 2011 is the latest completed Indian census. When the next census publishes, pages will be refreshed; interim corrections happen on an ongoing basis (see below).
Corrections
Found a wrong figure? Tell us — every page's history is kept in version control, so corrections are auditable and usually live within a day. Corrections from readers outrank every automated process.
Primary sources
- Census of India 2011 — official tables
- Open-Meteo — forecast & air-quality APIs (CC-BY 4.0)
- GeoNames — geonames.org (CC-BY 4.0)
- Wikimedia REST/Pageview APIs — wikimedia.org
- Wikipedia city infoboxes and UA tables — cross-reference for census republication