SciPy India · three talks · every demo runs on real, live Indian data
One idea, attacked from three directions: maps are not special software. They are counting, measuring, and connecting dots, done carefully. Each talk has working demos you can run yourself, built on a satellite photo of the Brahmaputra, 38 million real buildings, live fire alerts, Delhi's air sensors, and the shape of the Himalaya.
Six things everyone treats as expensive mapping-software buttons, rebuilt in a few lines of Python each. Finding water in a satellite photo, distance zones, the nearest village to every fire, mountain paths, a pollution map of Delhi, and where the rain goes.
Talk 02 · engineeringOne innocent question: find the nearest road for every building in Bihar. 38 million buildings, 11 million road points. The obvious approach needs 69 days and a 3,400-terabyte table. The right representation answers it in 5 seconds on one machine. This talk is about the difference.
Talk 03 · conceptualPut a map on screen. Take it apart until only mathematics is left: terrain becomes a grid of numbers, towns become a cloud of points, roads become a graph, and "where should the next hospital go?" becomes an equation with an exact answer. Then bring the map back to look at what you solved.
One real Indian problem each, solved live from raw data to a decision. Less lecture, more lab notebook: every number below came out of an actual run.
The September 2025 Kosi flood in four acts: radar finds 270 km² of water through the clouds, 25,428 buildings turn out to be in it, 195,565 lose their road access, and an equation places the relief camps.
Story B · land recordsThe compensation question, answered from 11.2 million raw cadastral parcels: 2,945 flooded, village by village. Plus the uncomfortable measurement: the cadastral map itself sits 20–34 metres west of reality.
Story C · urban expansionTwo mosaics, eight years apart: 37.5 km² of new construction marching east and west along the Ganga, found by a rule you can read — including the texture trick that stops sandbars posing as concrete.
Story D · accessibilityEvery building in Bihar, stamped with its true road distance to the nearest of 1,276 hospitals, in one 1.4-second sweep. 7.4% are beyond 20 km, and the single best new hospital site turns out to be Bagaha.