India's electrification frontier
Twenty years of DMSP night-lights, district by district. Drag the slider or hit play to watch the country light up between 1994 and 2013.
The median district roughly doubles in brightness between 1994 and 2013 (calibrated mean DN of 2.1 → 5.0). The gain is wildly uneven. Bihar — the canonical “BIMARU” state — goes from 0.7 to 3.9, a 5.3× jump that mirrors its post-2005 grid push. Himachal, Jammu & Kashmir, Meghalaya, Uttarakhand and Odisha all roughly 5× from near-zero baselines.
The northeast barely moves. Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Nagaland and Manipur all sit below 2.5 mean DN in 2013 — dimmer than rural Bihar was in 1994. Chandigarh and Delhi start saturated and stay that way; the visible action is in the Hindi belt and the south, where dense pixels of mid-amber spread across previously dark countryside.
State-level slope, 1994 → 2013
Each line is one state. The steepest lines are states that started near dark and approached the saturated cities. Hover any line to highlight it.
Data: SHRUG v2.1 (Pakora) — DMSP-OLS stable-lights, intercalibrated and aggregated to PC11 district. Each value is the cell-weighted calibrated mean DN per ~1 km² pixel. Boundaries from datameet/maps (Census 2011 districts), with Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Aksai Chin polygons added from datameet's disputed-territories layer so the outline follows the Indian-claim boundary. Those areas have no DMSP rollup and are shown unfilled.