About Pandal Hoppings
Pandal Hoppings answers one question on a Puja night: which pandal next? You say where you are, how long you have and what you like; it gives you an order to walk, when to leave each stop, and what is on the way. It is free, independent, and built for a phone in one hand on a crowded lane.
The name is the plural of the thing it is for: pandal hopping in Kolkata during Durga Puja. People also find it as “Pandal Hopping Kolkata” or pandalhoppings.com. It launched in October 2026 for Durga Puja 2026 (17 to 21 October) and is not affiliated with any puja committee, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, the police, Kolkata Metro or the WBTC bus tours.
What is in the data
- 159 pandals in 21 walkable areas, each with its position, entry, style (theme, traditional, bonedi bari), typical peak queue, time inside and nearest metro station. Browse them.
- 34 public toilets and drinking-water points, because that is the stop nobody plans. See the list.
- 127 famous places to eat and drink, chosen the way a friend would name them, not a directory. What to order where.
- 59 side attractions on the lanes between pandals: ghats, heritage houses, the potters' quarter, puja-week fairs.
- Walking times between every pair of nearby pandals, measured on OpenStreetMap streets.
How it is made
Each pandal and stop was researched against a written brief and then re-checked by a separate script that fetches every cited source and measures how far the pin is from it. Coordinates come only from OpenStreetMap, geotagged Wikimedia Commons photos, Wikidata, or a map link from someone on the ground; we never scrape map providers whose terms forbid storing their data. A confidence grade (high, medium, low) travels with every row and shows up in the app as “approx. spot” when it is low.
The route engine runs in your browser: it scores pandals for the mode you chose, fits as many as your time allows with their queues and walking legs, and re-plans when you fall behind. It never ranks pandals publicly; the internal signals exist only to order a route.
Credits and terms
Street and metro data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL. Photos and coordinates from Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata under their respective licences. Pandal names belong to their committees. Walking times are estimates; always follow police and volunteer directions.
The pandal, stop and landmark positions are open data: download them from /data under the ODbL, with credit to “Pandal Hoppings, pandalhoppings.com”. Everything else on the site, including the queue and crowd estimates, is © Pandal Hoppings. See the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, or write to localite@gmail.com.
About: questions people ask
- Who makes Pandal Hoppings?
- A small independent team in Kolkata who got tired of spending Puja nights in the wrong queue. It is not affiliated with any puja committee, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation, the police or Kolkata Metro, and it sells nothing.
- Where does the pandal data come from?
- Every pandal pin comes from OpenStreetMap, a geotagged Wikimedia Commons photo, Wikidata, or a map link supplied by someone who knows the lane, and each row records its source and a confidence grade. Queue and crowd estimates are our own, informed by past years, and will be wrong on some nights.
- How are walking times calculated?
- On OpenStreetMap streets with our own routing, precomputed between every pair of pandals in an area, at an unhurried Puja-night pace. They exclude queues. We do not use Google or Mapbox routing, whose terms forbid storing the results.
- What do you collect about me?
- No account, no sign-up. The planner uses your location only in your browser to compute the route. The only time a location reaches us is when you tap 'Share my current location' in a report about a pandal. We record anonymous usage (which modes and areas get planned, whether a route was followed) to improve the routes. The Privacy Policy at pandalhoppings.com/privacy has the full list.
- A pandal or stop is in the wrong place. How do I tell you?
- Use the 'Pin in the wrong place? Tell us' link under any stop in a route, or 'Missing a pandal? Add it' at the bottom of the planner. A map link or a photo is enough; corrections usually go live the same day during Puja week.