India(Bharat)

There are many languages, including Hindi, and they vary by region; some signs are English-only. In city centers, signs often have the address written in English underneath, so cities are frequently easy to identify.

Utility poles come in shapes you rarely see elsewhere. The most common has a top that splits into three, like a mountain or an anchor (⚓).

Utility pole wiring is often messy and unorganized.

Image quality is often poor, with heavy blurring.

There are bollards shaped a bit like ones you'd find in Cambodia. Some look like black-and-white bollards too.

License plates come in several colors — white, yellow, black, and more.

Rickshaws with a yellow band around the windows and green below are seen countrywide, but more common in the north.

If a rickshaw is yellow all around, both windows and below, consider the south.

A field packed with thin stalks taller than a person, or a scene with cut bundles of stalks submerged in ponds or channels, means jute. West Bengal accounts for most of it, with the rest in Bihar and Assam.

Plantations with low coffee trees under tall shade trees line the Western Ghats of south India. Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu account for most of it. However, it overlaps with areas that have little Street View coverage, so you may not see it often.

Oil palm is grown in the south, with about 90% of production concentrated in Andhra Pradesh in the southeast. Telangana and Kerala have small amounts too.

Rapeseed fields are common in the especially dry parts of the northwest.

Rice paddies are common in Telangana in the southeast, Uttar Pradesh in the north, West Bengal in the east, and Punjab in the northwest. They're rare in the dry western regions.

Cotton is most common in Gujarat in the west, followed by Maharashtra and Telangana on the black, fertile soil of the Deccan Plateau.

Tea plantations are common in the northeast (Assam, Darjeeling) and the south (Kerala, the Nilgiris).

If it looks like barley, consider the northern area around Rajasthan. Wheat is concentrated in Madhya Pradesh and the area north of it.

If you see tall sugarcane fields and a sugar mill with a smokestack, head for one of three states: Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, or Karnataka.

If you see a yellow tank, it's probably a southern city like Bengaluru or Chennai.

Red-brick buildings are somewhat more common in the north.

The south may have more houses with walls painted with laterite, or concrete walls with flat tiles.

In the old city of Jodhpur in the northwest, house walls are painted blue, and buildings painted blue are a common sight.

The western coast is the wettest part of the country, and its houses have steep roofs to withstand the rain. Some are built with a roof over another roof.

Like Goa, it rains a lot here and tall palm trees are common. Kerala's traditional architecture is often two stories.

Assam is prone to earthquakes and flooding, so you'll occasionally find walls of light materials like bamboo, or houses built on stilts. Heavy materials like brick would collapse in an earthquake.

Mangrove forest standing in salt water spreads across the Sundarbans in West Bengal. However, there is no Street View there.

High-rainfall areas like Kerala and Assam have a lot of a tall tree, Areca catechu.

A square hole near the top of a utility pole points to a Punjab town.

A yellow rectangular sticker on a utility pole might mean Uttar Pradesh. It's often hard to see because it's torn or covered over with paper.

A pole with holes (a "holey pole") means Gujarat.

Hyderabad and similar areas may have poles built in sections ("section poles"). Consider Telangana or Andhra Pradesh.

If a "mountain"-shaped pole has a ▽ (downward-pointing right triangle) near its base, it might be Madhya Pradesh.

A pole shaped like the Japanese characters "キ" or "干" is found in Goa. Pretty reliable.

Black soil, also called regur soil, is spread across the Deccan Plateau area. It's also well suited to growing cotton.

White, sandy-looking alluvial soil, deposited by the Indus and Ganges rivers, is found in the north. It's flat, with scattered wetlands.

Even if the soil is red, if the surroundings are rugged mountains with a lot of forest, consider the eastern or western Nepal border areas too.

Dry flatland with sand dunes and sparse thorny shrubs stretching on means the Thar Desert in the northwest. Mostly in Rajasthan.

A dense green mountain range rising abruptly from the western coast is the Western Ghats. It runs north-south across six states, from Gujarat to Tamil Nadu.

A single smokestack standing in a field, surrounded by a low oval or rectangular wall and stacked piles of brick, means a brick kiln.

A hint would be a terraced open-cut wall, or a truck loaded with black coal. If you spot one, count yourself lucky — and it still won't narrow the region down much.

A yellow label with a number on a street pole means Chandigarh.

At over 3,600m elevation is the city of Leh, whose population is mostly Tibetan. Tibetan script can be seen around town, and mountains are visible in every direction.