Does anyone know how to find a shapefile with boundaries of Indian municipalities?
I have tehsil boundaries as for year 2001, but I would like boundaries of municipalities and, ideally, also historic ones.
I believe Census of India has the information but I couldn't find any maps or shapefiles...
Admin boundaries below the taluka level are available only in the District Census Handbooks (where a map is given for each taluka or CD block). These taluka/CD block maps contain village and town boundaries (not boundaries of wards inside towns). These maps are not very accurate (spatially): our attempt to digitize and georectify these maps produces layers with 500m RMS errors. But they are still the only source.
If Sheila can indicate which towns she wants boundaries for, I might be able to find them in our collection (created in the above manner).
Boundaries over time: that is expecting too much :-) In theory, as towns grow, they swallow neighbouring villages (or parts of them) and these changes are depicted in the successive District Census Handbooks. The latest handbooks available are for 2001. The 2011 sets will take another year or two to get published--even tabular data have not been fully released.
Shape files for India municipalities/village level won't be available as of now, But can be generated in QGIS or other such softwares by overlay digitization with background Web Map Services. India's Bhuvan is providing Web Map Service for 18 States at village or municipality level along with other numerous layers. To use WMS with QGIS this is a good tutorial. Hopefully provision of Web feature Service would change this redundancy in future. For a start, to get WMS layer of Tamil Nadu villages in QGIS, first create Bhuvan WMS in it
.
To get the specific layer, connect created WMS and choose appropriate layer from the long list, in our case Tamil Nadu village boundary 
, then click add to get the WMS of Tamil Nadu village boundary.
The Bhuvan address is changed: present address for the data is
You can find what you looking for in:
Regards
EDIT
The GADM data is available here, you can choose the country and download format required.
Available File Formats are:
A "shapefile" consist of at least three actual files. This is a commonly used format that can be directly used in Arc-anything, DIVA-GIS, and many other programs. Unfortunately, many of the non standard latin (roman / english) characters are lost in the shapefile. Even if you use the shapefile for mapping, you can use the .csv file that comes with the shapefiles, or the attribute data in the geodatabase for the correct attributes (the geodatabase is a MS Access database that (on windows) can be accessed via ODBC).
An "ESRI personal geodatabase" is a MS Access file that can be opened in ArcGIS (version 10). One of its advantages, compared to a shapefile, is that it can store non-latin characters (e.g. Cyrillic and Chinese characters). You can also query the (attribute) data in Access or via ODBC.
An "ESRI file geodatabase" can be opened in ArcGIS (version 10). It can also store non-latin characters (e.g. Cyrillic and Chinese characters).
A "Google Earth .kmz" file can be opened in Google Earth.
A "RData" file can be used in R (with the sp package loaded). See the CRAN spatial task view
