Where does India live? — An Alternate Take on the Population Density Map
I came across this post by Dr. James Cheshire who conceptualized a beautiful alternate take on the population Density Map which he termed the “Population Lines”.
The peaks give information about both the population & the density: the area under the graph represents the total population, while the higher the peak, the more dense it is. Broader the peak, the more area it covers.
This is perhaps a better way to vizualize this type of data than the traditional population density maps.
I tried to recreate the map specifically for India (on R) and here is the output.
If you’re interested in the code, please check out my Github (with thanks to
Ryan Brideau who wrote a R script to map population density data of the world)
Some thoughts
1. I like how certain parts of Kashmir are blank because they’re completely uninhabitable i.e. regions like Aksai Chin. (And for the politically sentimental, this map includes Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) which is surprising since the data source from a non-Indian entity)
2. Rather obvious but population density ‘spread’ correlates with availability of fertile land i.e. Ganga-Brahmaputra delta — where dense regions aren’t segregated in clusters
3. I can notice that Bangalore’s peak isn’t as striking as one would’ve thought — Let me blame that on the data source for now
4. All the usual suspects are there with a specific portion of Kolkata having the highest population density in the country
As far as granularity of the data source goes, population is captured by latitude and longitude with intervals of 0.04167 in each — Which translates to 4 kilometers each way.
For reference here are the maps for Europe and the World —
The original reddit posts which inspired me to make this map for India are linked below the images.
