Building Footprints Across India from OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap exports provide building footprints across India, including every feature tagged as a building. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) compiled this data, which includes structures from residential homes to hospitals, schools, and places of worship. The dataset was last updated on 2026-05-15.

Use Cases

• Estimate population density based on building locations and types.
• Assess damage to structures after natural disasters using building footprint data.
• Plan urban infrastructure and services using the spatial distribution of buildings.
• Analyze land use patterns by categorizing building types like residential, commercial, or institutional.

Strengths

• Data is sourced from OpenStreetMap, a widely-used collaborative mapping project.
• Includes a variety of building types such as residential, hospitals, schools, and places of worship.
• Available in multiple geospatial file formats including GEOPACKAGE, SHP, and JSON.

Limitations

• Completeness varies by region; urban areas are usually well-mapped while remote areas may be incomplete.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

OpenStreetMap

Collection Method

Volunteer-contributed mapping and export by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT).

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-15 09:06:51.948127.

Geography

India