When we first had the idea for a dataviz community in India, we created a WhatsApp group. It now has over 1,500 people. I did not know that 1,500 people in India cared about charts.

Then we did a conference. 300+ showed up. Several traveled from other cities to be in Bangalore for it. I turned a corner on the terrace, saw the crowd, and it hit me all at once. These are the things you never think will happen. And then they do. Dataviz as a discipline is real in India. People have cared about it for a long time. It was just waiting for a place to gather.

The full crowd at VizChitra 2025, Bangalore International Centre. 300+ people from journalism, design, research, tech, and policy. 180 of the 300+ attendees at VizChitra 2025, Bangalore International Centre.

That’s VizChitra. India’s first data visualisation conference.

I run a data visualisation agency. Every week I watch the same thing happen: a journalist, a designer, a researcher, a product manager, all figuring out how to make complex things feel clear. Same problem. Completely different worlds. They don’t know each other exists. VizChitra puts them in the same room.

People told us it wouldn’t work. “An event for everyone is an event for no one.” Fair concern. But here’s what actually happened: 300+ people showed up, and the thing they loved most was exactly the thing we were warned about. “I met someone from a completely different field wrestling with the same problems I have.” That sentence, over and over.

It makes sense when you think about it. Data visualisation is an interdisciplinary discipline. A designer who’s never dealt with messy data sits next to someone who lives in spreadsheets but can’t make anything look clear. A journalist who’s brilliant at narrative meets a developer who can build the thing she’s been imagining. They fill each other’s gaps. That’s not a weakness of putting different people in one room. That’s the whole point of it.

Audience interaction at Lilly's sponsor booth, VizChitra 2025. Audience interaction at Lilly’s sponsor booth, VizChitra 2025.

VizChitra 2026. July 3-4, Bangalore International Centre.

150+ proposals received. 17 talks selected. 7 workshops. Full lineup here. Here is a flavour of who’s speaking:

Arvind Satyanarayan from MIT CSAIL, one of the creators of Vega and Vega-Lite, on what lies beyond grammar in the infinite graphic space. Shubhra Agarwal from Bengawalk on redesigning BMTC Majestic bus maps with the government. Sneha Kaul from UN Women Asia-Pacific on what she learns about data communication by asking government officials “what’s in your bag?” Saurabh Arora from Plum on the shape of health costs. Surbhi Bhatia visualising Bollywood. Rohit Saran from The Times of India on telling timely and timeless stories with data. Workshops by professionals from Reuters, Capital One, The Hindu, and Revisual Labs.

Prasanta Kumar Dutta (Reuters) on stage at VizChitra 2025. Prasanta Kumar Dutta (Reuters) on stage at VizChitra 2025. “If it doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t going to be read or understood right.”

The honest part

VizChitra is not a business. It is a group of volunteers who do this even though they don’t have to, because they believe this community deserves a home. Ticket sales alone don’t cover it. Without sponsors, this runs at a loss.

Here’s how you can help:

1. Buy a ticket. tickets.vizchitra.com. Buy one for yourself. Get your boss to buy one too! If you’ve ever struggled to make dataviz matter in your organisation, send your leadership to this event. Let them see what’s possible. Let them sit in a room where data communication is taken seriously. That shifts perception faster than any internal presentation you’ll ever make.

2. Share this. Forward it to your team, your network, your group chat. The reason people miss things is often that nobody told them.

3. Sponsor. Some of our sponsors last year used the event to recruit. Others came for visibility. Some just believed the community should exist. Tiers from Rs 50,000 to Rs 7,50,000. All details in this deck.

4. Apply for financial aid (deadline: May 25). 10 scholarships. Free ticket + up to Rs 5,000 for travel. Not means-tested. If cost is a barrier, apply. We’d rather have you on a scholarship than not have you at all.

5. Don’t need aid? Know someone who does? A student, an early-career practitioner, someone from a smaller city. Send them this.

VizChitra tote bag: "If data is the new soil, what will you grow?" “If data is the new soil, what will you grow?”

See you in Bangalore.