Hi DataMeet community,
I’m Pranjay Parashar, founder of Stats&Data. We are an organization specializing in political, social, and electoral data analysis. Recently, our work has focused heavily on conducting and tracking opinion polls across the US, the UK, and the Indian elections.
As we dive deeper into granular electoral analysis for India, we are working on a project that requires a master map of all ~4,120 Indian Assembly Constituencies (Vidhan Sabha). Because we rely heavily on tools like Flourish to publish our data visualizations, we need this boundary data to be in highly optimized, lightweight GeoJSON or TopoJSON formats.
I know this community has done incredible foundational work compiling the base shapefiles in the datameet/maps repositories. Before we try to reinvent the wheel, I wanted to ask the group for advice on a few specific challenges:
1.Recent Delimitations: Has anyone already compiled a unified nationwide dataset that includes the post-delimitation boundaries for Jammu & Kashmir (2022) and Assam (2023)?
2.Web Optimization: When converting the heavy ECI/Survey of India shapefiles down to web-friendly sizes (ideally under 5MB), what workflows or scripts are you using to simplify the geometries without breaking the shared topology between constituencies?
3.Existing Repos: If a clean, web-ready dataset with standard metadata (State Name, AC Name, AC Number) already exists for the most recent electoral map, could someone point me in the right direction?
Any advice on tools (QGIS workflows, Mapshaper, GeoPandas scripts) or links to updated forks would be hugely appreciated.
Thanks for your time and for all the great open-source work this group has already done!
Best,
Pranjay Parashar
Founder, Stats&Data