Pandalers is a guide to Durga Puja pandal hopping in Kolkata. It exists for one evening, repeated: you are on a street at eleven at night with three hours left, and you want to know which pandals are close, which are worth the queue, and which of the ones you planned are still unvisited.
No account is needed to use any of it. Open the site, allow location if you want distances, and mark pandals off as you reach them — by hand, or by walking a route you planned in the planner, which ticks each stop off as you arrive. Everything you mark stays on your device unless you choose to sign in, which hands it to your account so the next phone can pick it up. It is your progress, not a profile. A Puja year runs to 31 December: the year that ends is kept as history, and the next one starts from zero.
Every pandal in the collection. Search and filter by area, theme and distance, sort by how busy or how walkable they are, and see what is left to visit.
A map you can plan on. Pandal markers, metro stations, ferry ghats and somewhere open to eat, because a night out needs one. A route planner walks or drives you between the stops you pick.
The practical layer. The panjika with a day-by-day calendar, transit and parking, public toilets, and the helpline numbers worth having saved before you need them.
Photographs from visitors. Add a picture of a pandal and it joins that pandal's gallery. Contributing asks you to sign in — a photograph with a person behind it is a contribution, and one with nobody behind it is something nobody is answerable for — and a person looks at it before it is published.
Pandal records, meaning names, addresses, localities, the founding year, a rating and a crowd expectation, are imported from published community listings and normalised into a single collection. The city guide's places and transit hubs come from OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence.
Each Puja edition is stored separately. A pandal's theme, photographs and details belong to the year they were published in, so Puja 2027 starts its own record rather than overwriting this one, and last year's page still reads as it did.
This is an independent guide and not an official festival listing. Where a detail is wrong, it is our data that is wrong, not the puja's.
Distances, the “near me” filter and automatic visit detection all need your position. It is used to answer the question you just asked and nothing else: no history is kept, no profile is built, and turning location off forgets the choice rather than merely pausing it. The privacy page sets out exactly what is stored and where.
There is no subscription and nothing to buy. The site is paid for by advertising, supplied by third-party networks and always labelled as advertising. It is deliberately kept out of the way: an ad sits between sections of a page rather than in front of the thing you came to read, nothing on the sign-in or account pages is given over to it, and the pandal listings themselves are never for sale — a committee cannot pay to be listed, ranked or described differently.
An advertisement is not a recommendation. Nobody pays Pandalers for a good write-up, and we choose where an ad may appear but not which ad you are shown. What those networks record, and how to switch personalised advertising off, is set out on the privacy page.
Pandalers is built and maintained by IndoGeek. It is a Next.js front end over a Go API and a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database, and it runs as a single deployable stack.
Find me here. I answer to all of them.
Spotted a pandal we have missed, or a detail that has gone stale? Corrections come through the same pipeline as the data, and the issue tracker is the fastest way to reach it.
Pandalers is not open source. Copyright in everything published here, meaning the code, the design, the written content, the collection of pandal records and every photograph on it, belongs to Tanumoy Maity, and the name Pandalers is a mark of the same owner. It is published so that visitors can read it and use it as a visitor. Nothing beyond that is granted.
Copying the site, reusing its data, or running any of it under this name or one close to it needs written permission first. The full terms, including the signed notice of ownership, are one download away.
Pandalers version 1.14.0. The software this site depends on, and the OpenStreetMap data it uses, stay under their own licences. The licence above does not change them.