Evidence-preserving temporal geography and a village-level Census backbone for Jharkhand, India

Village-level research in India is constrained by a subtle infrastructure problem: authoritative datasets often describe the same named places through different identifiers, administrative hierarchies, time points, and publication systems. We present the Jharkhand Life Atlas (JLA) Module 1, an evidence-preserving geographic and Census backbone designed to make those differences explicit rather than silently harmonizing them away. The release represents 1 state, 24 districts, 261 Census subdistricts, and 32,624 Census-2011 villages; a separate current Local Government Directory view contains 24 districts, 264 subdistricts, 264 blocks, 4,369 panchayats, and 32,962 villages. Exact-code validation retains 32,623 whole-place Primary Census Abstract records, 32,394 District Census Handbook amenity rows, and 32,584 MDDS rows, including 32,583 explicit 2001 codes. A fail-closed temporal rule asserts zero official Census-to-current-LGD village links because the retrieved LGD response does not expose a Census-2011 village-code field. We introduce a machine-auditable completeness framework, quantify residual gap concentration, document source rights and checksums, and report a reproducible end-to-end build. JLA converts dispersed official records into a transparent, extensible place infrastructure while preserving uncertainty, provenance, missingness, and temporal identity for downstream multidisciplinary research. The fixed reference release remains a durable joining layer for independently versioned thematic evidence.