District map of India

[S Anand]

I've been working on Arun Ganesh's district map of India, annotating the paths with district/state name as an attribute. I've done this for a few states (attached).

The trouble is, districts keep changing. Does anyone know:

a) What is a district? Which department of the Govt defines it, and how is it used?

b) What were the districts, historically? At least since 1980? How do these map to each other?

Thanks

Anand

[Gautam John]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 3:03 PM, S Anand <root...@gmail.com> wrote:

> a) What is a district? Which department of the Govt defines it, and how is
> it used?

Over on Twitter, Sundar (who I hope joins soon) says that districts
are revenue districts and if that be the case, they are defined by
some revenue department.

The multiple boundaries are such a bloody pain.

[Arjun Ram]

This link has all the data needed http://panchayatdirectory.gov.in/

But no shape files. These guys even have it mapped but their data is locked before their own co-ordinate system. We used this data to clean up our geo-data.

Hope this helps. Cheers!

--
Arjun Ram

[S Anand]

Thanks Arjun, Gautam.

BTW, I've gotten 5 different counts for the number of districts from 5 different sites (so far):

599 - http://dolr.nic.in/Hyperlink/distlistnew.htm

626 - http://india.gov.in/knowindia/districts.php

627 - http://districts.nic.in/dstats.aspx

640 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_districts_of_India

641 - http://panchayatdirectory.gov.in/

I guess the number jumped from around 626 to around 640 between the censuses of 2001 and 2011... I wonder if any of these are more "authoritative" than the other...

[Gautam John]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 9:34 PM, S Anand <root...@gmail.com> wrote:

> BTW, I've gotten 5 different counts for the number of districts from 5
> different sites (so far):

This about sums up the state of public data in India.

I'd go with:

> 641 - http://panchayatdirectory.gov.in/

Being the authoritative one.

There is this too:

http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011census/maps/maps2011.html

(This has some interesting maps but am on a data card and cannot download them.)

And the new districts here:

http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011census/maps/administrative_maps/INDIA_CHANGES_2011.pdf

Arjun also pointed out that the 2001 Census codes are available here:

http://pmgsy.nic.in/ click on codes on the left.

[Arjun Ram]

Datasets that have 599  to 626 are really really old. When we iterated on our data about 1.5 yrs ago it was 626. New districts have been carved out after. 

--
Arjun Ram

[S Anand]

Looks like the 641 districts at http://panchayatdirectory.gov.in/ is the most accurate. 

The 640 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_districts_of_India does not include http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chhatrapati_Shahuji_Maharaj_Nagar_district which was created in July 2010.

Anyway, I've mapped the 640 districts into an SVG file here: https://bitbucket.org/sanand0/districts/src/tip/districts.svg

Enjoy :-)

Regards

Anand

[Arjun Ram]

Nice! Are shape files available for this list? ;)

--
Arjun Ram

[S Anand]

I've no idea how to create .shp files. But just wondering... what tools do you use that read Shapefiles, but not SVG? (I ask because I've only ever used Inkscape and Powerpoint to process vector formats, and neither saves as .SHP...)

Regards

Anand

[Arjun Ram]

We just use libraries available in ruby to process them ;)

--
Arjun Ram

[Arun Ganesh]

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 4:35 PM, Arjun Ram <li...@arjunram.com> wrote:

We just use libraries available in ruby to process them ;)

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 4:32 PM, S Anand <root...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've no idea how to create .shp files. But just wondering... what tools do you use that read Shapefiles, but not SVG? (I ask because I've only ever used Inkscape and Powerpoint to process vector formats, and neither saves as .SHP...)

Since shapefiles are a superior vector format with georeferencing, it would have been ideal to have the data in this format. You can anytime do a  shp->svg conversion but not the other way around. 

For the latest district shapefiles, we will just have to hope that the census of India releases them. I dont think there's any other source as of now.

If anyone is interested, the 2001 census district shapefiles are available from http://geocommons.com/overlays/131045 ( But it seems to have some missing shapes)

You can work with shapefiles using quantumgis/grass http://qgis.org/

Regards

Anand

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 11:29 AM, Arjun Ram <li...@arjunram.com> wrote:

Nice! Are shape files available for this list? ;)

On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 3:41 PM, S Anand <root...@gmail.com> wrote:

Looks like the 641 districts at http://panchayatdirectory.gov.in/ is the most accurate. 

The 640 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_districts_of_India does not include http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chhatrapati_Shahuji_Maharaj_Nagar_district which was created in July 2010.

Anyway, I've mapped the 640 districts into an SVG file here: https://bitbucket.org/sanand0/districts/src/tip/districts.svg

Enjoy :-)

Regards

Anand

--
Arjun Ram

--
j.mp/ArunGanesh