India in 30 Maps

India in 30 Maps

30. Mar 2021
4 minutes read

1. Visualizing the network formed by 8,697 🚉 railway stations in India.

Made with geopandas, matplotlib

Visualizing the network formed by 8,697 🚉 railway stations in India.

2. A day in the Indian Railways Network

Animating Rajdhani trains 🚆 moving from and to New Delhi. Data: data.gov datameet.


3. Literacy in India

Understanding the picture at district level from census data. Just over a quarter districts have literacy above 70%. data: Census 2021


4. Access to healthcare

Visualizing concentration of hospitals across India. Data: nhpindia


5. Elevation of Rivers

Attempt to understand changing heights of Indian Rivers from openstreetmap and DEM data.


6. Land Surface Temperature

Remarkable changes in land surface temperatures across India in 2020. Data: NASAEarthData


7. Urban Green Spaces in India

How green are Indian cities? Looking at spaces including parks, forests, recreation grounds, etc. within 25km grids. Data: openstreetmap


8. Solar Potential in India

Visualizing direct normal solar irradiance throughout the year with current installed capacity of solar plants. Data: NREL, WorldResources, mnreindia


9. Air Quality in India

Comparing AQI and PM2.5 particulate matter across major Indian cities. As on today, DelhiAirQuality is 4x that of any other major Indian city.


10. Plant Growth Patterns

Changing green vegetation in India. NDVI data from NASAEart


11. Hills of southern India

Visualizing exaggerated terrain model over OpenStreetMap map ⛰️


12. Visualizing rainfall patterns in India with PowerPoint

Slides and objects are auto-generated from data.😃 data: Indiametdept


13. 30 Years of Ganga Koshi Confluence

Tracing changing river courses from Landsat imagery. Uses band combination of SWIR1,NIR,Red for color.


14. Rainfall Anomaly in India

Tracking unpredictable rainfall changes. We compare annual rainfall deficits since 2001 with average baseline of 1980-2000.


15. The Toy Train Connection

Built in the 1880s, this mountain railway spanning 88km connects New Jalpaiguri (100m) to Darjeeling (2,200m elevation)


16. Islands of Power held by Women

A look at constituencies that have elected at least one woman MP since 1962. There are still ~50% constituencies yet to elect a woman MP to the Indian Parliament.


17. 18th Century Kingdoms of India

Interesting to see how the terrain separates the kingdoms of Malabar and Carnatic from Mysore empire, and Northern Sarkars and Nizams from the Marathas.

Historical map from 1923 Atlas.


18: India’s Urban Sprawl

Understanding how Indian cities have grown from 1985 to 1995 and to 2005, using land cover and land use data. Data: NASAEarth DAAC ORNL


19. Areas without Train Stations

These are 30x30 km grid areas in India without a train station.


20: Population density of India

Pretty conspicuous that northern India across the fertile plains of river Ganges is much more densely packed than the rest of India. Data: GHSL 2015 estimate.


21: Dams of Central India

A look at how dams are built around some of the major rivers of India. Data: GRanD, OpenStreetMap


22. Migration in India

Mapping Inter-State migratory movements. Interesting to see that apart from Delhi and Mumbai, most state migrations happen just around the state borders.


23. Nearest Capital-based Boundaries

Mapping each district of India to the nearest capital city. Distance from the nearest capital city is measured from district’s center location.


24: The origins of Ganga

Alaknanda and Bhagirathi rivers meet at Devprayag (at 830m elevation) to form Ganga, and in less than 75kms, Ganga drops to 370m at Rishikesh. Data: isro cartodem, OSM


25. COVID-19 India

Trends in daily new cases reported across India. Looking at 7-day moving average of new cases at district (/city) level.


26. Density of rural facilities in India

~7 lakh facilities surveyed for PMGSY-III (Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana). Kerala’s density outshines pretty blazingly.


27. Mapping #OpenStreetMap’s Point Features

Understanding 561,068 points coverage. Lots to learn from #Kerala’s community mappers. Karnataka, AP, Telangana and parts of Chhattisgarh have relatively decent coverage.


28: Vertical Pixel Sorting by Color Brightness

Terrain color histogram by column / longitudes. Source: ESRI


29: First successful voyage to India

In 1497, Vasco da Gama started from Lisbon, Portugal and reached Calicut a year later via the Cape of Good Hope.


30: The Final Map

Collage that sums up the 30 maps I’ve made about India 🇮🇳 for this challenge.🧑🏾‍💻