Writing
Research & Writing
Published articles, policy essays, and urban planning research.
Bholakpur's Warming Pulse: A Decade of Urbanization and Heat
How Ward 88 in Hyderabad heated up 1.85°C in ten years
Bholakpur Ward 88 in Hyderabad has seen median land surface temperatures rise from 40.8°C to 42.7°C between 2014 and 2024 — a 1.85°C increase — despite slight gains in vegetation. Using satellite thermal data, this piece traces how concrete expansion and densification are driving heat in one of the city's most populated neighbourhoods.
Caught in the Heat Trap: How Urban Sprawl is Reshaping Life in Hyderabad's Kondapur Ward
Thermal inequity across income lines in Ward 104
In Hyderabad's Ward 104, rapid urbanization has pushed land surface temperatures from 47.5°C to 52.5°C over a decade. Dense, lower-income pockets like Premnagar experience disproportionately higher temperatures than affluent zones — a thermal map of inequality made visible through satellite imagery.
Tracking Urban Heat in Bellandur
How Bengaluru's IT boom turned villages into heat hotspots
Bellandur in Bengaluru's Ward 150 exemplifies how rapid IT-driven urbanization transforms thermal environments. Open areas register temperatures roughly 10°C hotter than surrounding zones, while lakes and tree-covered areas still function as natural cooling refuges — a pattern that reveals how much urban heat depends on what we choose to preserve.
Essays & Research
CUMTA: What Working Inside the System Taught Me About Urban Mobility
A Look at the Institutional Realities of Urban Transport Governance
When we talk about traffic problems in Indian cities, we think about visible issues like congestion or lack of buses. But from what I've experienced working within the ecosystem of Chennai's mobility planning, the real issue often lies elsewhere: it is governance.
Multimodal Transit Connectivity & Real-Time Performance Gaps in Metropolitan Chennai
Integrating GTFS Schedule Feeds with Real-Time Vehicle Telemetry to Measure Accessibility Deficits across 3,500 km²
Traditional transit planning models evaluate accessibility using static GTFS schedules. In reality, street traffic, vehicle breakdowns, and headway degradation create significant deficits between scheduled accessibility and street-level reality. This paper presents a spatial analytics framework combining static feeds, GPS telemetry, and 500m grid-cell spatial indexing across metropolitan Chennai.
Architectural Deep-Dive: Building a High-Performance 3D Digital Twin of 500k+ Buildings in the Browser
How we engineered a lightweight, interactive 3D web map using the Google Open Buildings dataset, GEE-derived height rasters, Maplibre GL, and real-time EV charging simulations
Urban digital twins have traditionally required heavy desktop GIS software or expensive server infrastructure. We built a hardware-accelerated 3D WebGIS pipeline that streams 525,000+ building footprints across 1,189 km² of metropolitan Chennai in the browser, compressing a 1.5 GB GeoJSON dataset down to 60 MB with client-side fflate decompression and WebGL extrusions.
Unlocking Chennai: Why Transit Data is the New Public Infrastructure
Reflections from the Build for Bharat Fellowship at CUMTA on why digital infrastructure and open data are foundational to modern urban mobility
When we talk about investing in public transit, our minds go to physical engineering—concrete, tracks, and electric buses. Reflections from my Build for Bharat fellowship at CUMTA on why digital infrastructure and open transit data are just as foundational as physical infrastructure.