About the data

What the map counts, where each number comes from, and what it deliberately does not show.

In short

6,792: Sacred groves listed in the state registers and placed in a district.
184 districts: In 24 states and union territories. Every other district has none listed, which is not the same as none.
0 locations: No grove is named or located on the map. Each is kept at village level until its custodians choose otherwise.
638 held back: Register lines that could not be placed in a district with certainty. They wait for a better match; they are not guessed.

The registers

The ENVIS centre on conservation of ecological heritage at C.P.R. Environmental Education Centre, Chennai, compiles the sacred groves that each state's own surveys and lists record. Maplore read those state pages, one line per grove, and kept the page each line came from.

State	Groves	Districts
Maharashtra	2,677	14
Tamil Nadu	1,262	38
Andhra Pradesh	657	15
Kerala	635	12
Rajasthan	565	17
Manipur	153	4
Uttarakhand	126	9
Telangana	113	10
Puducherry	108	1
Meghalaya	90	6
Goa	74	2
Arunachal Pradesh	70	8
West Bengal	59	4
Gujarat	40	4
Jharkhand	38	1
Jammu And Kashmir	30	3
Haryana	26	4
Madhya Pradesh	24	15
Assam	15	2
Odisha	11	5
Karnataka	7	3
Sikkim	6	2
Chhattisgarh	3	2
Uttar Pradesh	3	3

The registers are cited, not republished: Maplore shows counts only. Sources: 25 state pages at ecoheritage.cpreec.org.

How a grove is placed

Step	What happens
Village	2,417 groves: the register's village matched a village in the Local Government Directory, inside the district the register names.
District	4,375 groves: the village could not be matched, but the district could. Old and misspelt names are resolved ("Cuddapah" is today's Y.S.R. Kadapa), and registers written before a state was split are read into the new state (Andhra Pradesh's Adilabad is in Telangana).
Held	638 lines: no village or district that can be placed with certainty, such as a district later split in two ("Midnapur") or a village written where the district should be.
Dropped	51 lines that were not groves: page numbers and table headings.

An automatic "is this a grove?" score was tried first and set aside: it scored lines by how they were written, not by what they were, and would have dropped real groves. Each line is a record from an official register; the only question is where it belongs.

What is never shown

A grove's name, village, deity or area. They stay in Maplore's register, each with its citation.
A grove's location. None is drawn, and exact boundaries live in a separate store that the publishing system cannot read.
Anything that would let one be found. Every night, and before every change to this site goes live, a test scans every public file for any grove's identifier or name. If it finds one, nothing is published.

The names

Name	Groves	Where
Devrai	2,751	Goa, Maharashtra
Kovil kadu	1,262	Tamil Nadu
Kavu	635	Kerala
Oran	565	Rajasthan
Umanglai	153	Manipur
Deovan	126	Uttarakhand
Law kyntang	90	Meghalaya
Sarna	29	Jharkhand
Devarakadu	7	Karnataka
No local name in the register	1,174	15 states

The name is the one each state's register uses for its groves. A grove may have its own name locally; the registers do not record it here.

What it can't tell you

The registers list only some groves; a district with none listed is not a district with no groves.
Registers written before a district was split name the old district; the grove is counted in the district that keeps the name today.
The local name is the one each state's register uses for its groves, not a name recorded for each grove.
Whether a grove still stands. Registers are years old in places; nothing here has been checked on the ground yet.

Custodians of a grove can ask to add its story or choose how it is shown. Write to us.