Extrajudicial Executions in the Punjab

In the late 1970's and 1980's the Khalistan movement sought to establish a Sikh state in the Punjab region of India. This movement was often violent and was met in turn by violence from the Indian government. During the 1980's and 1990's the Khalistan movement and the Indian military & police both used excessive violence. Violence which led to numerous deaths on both sides.

It is believed that over 5,000 Sikhs were the victims of "enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions" by the Indian government's counterinsurgency measures during the 1980's & 1990's. Ensaaf's Crimes Against Humanity project is an attempt to document and map these disappearances and executions by the Indian security forces in the state of Punjab. The data was gathered from a village-by-village census project interviewing victim's families and examining documentary evidence.

The Crimes Against Humanity interactive map plots where Sikhs disappeared or were killed in the Punjab as a result of the Indian government's counterinsurgency. The interactive map includes a timeline which allows you to see when these disappearances took place. The markers on the map are scaled to reflect the number of victims documented at each location. You can click on these markers to learn more about each of the individual victims and the nature of their disappearance or killing.

Indian Election Maps

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had a landslide victory in the Indian election and increased its already huge parliamentary majority. The BJP, led by the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, won 303 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India's parliament. The next largest party, the Indian National Congress (INC), only managed to win 52 seats.

The Indian Express has released an interactive map of the Lok Sabha Election Results 2019. The map shows the winning party in each of the 543 constituencies. The map includes a cartogram view of the results which shows each of the constituencies as an equal sized square. Despite the BJP's huge majority there is still a geographical divide in support for India's political parties. The BJP won lots of seats in the north-west and center of the country. It won far fewer seats in the south and along the eastern seaboard.

The 2019 Lok Sabha election was the first election in India where women voted in equal numbers to men. The number of women who won a seat in the Lok Sabha was also the highest ever. The Indian Express map includes a filter control which allows you to see where female candidates won in this election. Although the number of female held seats has increased since the last election women still hold less than 10% of the seats in the Lok Sabha.


The Financial Times has created a choropleth map of the election results, which gives you an overview of the level of the winning majority in each seat. Again this view shows a north-south divide in the support for the BJP. Some of the party's biggest majorities were in the northern states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

Reuters' India Election Results interactive map also provides a 'margins' view, showing the margin of victory for the winning candidate in each seat. You can hover over individual seats on the Reuters map to view the percentage of the votes won by each of the main candidates. The Reuters map also includes a choropleth view of the voter turnout in each seat.

Hate Crimes in India

India’s National Crime Records Bureau does not record hate crimes separately from other crimes. It is therefore unable to document or spot the rise of religious based hate crimes in India. Which is why the Hate Crime Watch project was started in 2018. Hate Crime Watch is tracking crimes which have been committed against people or groups in India because of their caste, religion or ethnicity. Although the project was only launched in 2018 it includes data on religious motivated hate crimes carried out in India since 2009.

The Hate Crime Watch interactive map plots individual hate crimes to the location where they were carried out. The map includes a number of filter controls which allow you to filter the hate crimes shown on the map by year, type of assault and by individual state. If you select an individual dot on the map you can read details on the selected hate crime and view the source where Hate Crime Watch learned of the crime.


As has already been mentioned India’s National Crime Records Bureau does not record incidents of hate crime as actual hate crimes. Which is why Amnesty International has also released an interactive map that tracks incidents of hate crimes across the country. Halt the Hate maps crimes which have been committed against people or groups in India because of their caste, religion or ethnicity.

The Halt the Hate map is a very basic interactive map. You can't zoom in on the Amnesty International map and because the map has no place-labels it is very difficult to search this map by location. However the map does include a number of filter controls which allow you to explore the data by year, motive and individual states. Each hate crime incident shown on the map is based on media reports.

No Planes Over Pakistan

FlightRadar24 has become the go-to source for mappers searching for flight data, particularly when something happens to disrupt air traffic around the world. Last month the New York Times used data from FlightRadar24 to visualize the grounding of Boeing 737's around the world after the crash of Flight 302. Now Reuters has used data from the same source to visualize How India-Pakistan tensions have disrupted air travel.

During the early hours of February 26 Indian warplanes flew into the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan and dropped a number of bombs in the vicinity of the town of Balakot. India claimed that they had made a preemptive strike against a terrorist training camp. A claim which Pakistan disputes, saying that the bombs were dropped in an uninhabited area. The day after the Indian airstrike Pakistan cancelled all commercial flights and closed its airspace.

Reuters has used data from FlightRadar24 to create a number of maps showing how air travel in the region has been disrupted by Pakistan's closure of its airspace. These mapped visualizations include a series of small maps showing how a number of planes had to divert around Pakistan on the day that the airspace closure was announced. It also includes a larger map which provides a snapshot of flights on February 27, with a big absence of flights over Pakistan. A third map shows the flight paths of planes from April 3-9, most of them skirting around the southern tip of Pakistan.

Mapping the Ganges & Its Pollution

Reuters reports that the Indian government has pledged to spend nearly $3 billion on cleaning up the Ganges. The Ganges is of huge religious and cultural importance to millions of Indians. Millions of Indians also depend on the river everyday to supply their water needs. Unfortunately the river is also hugely polluted by industrial waste and plastics (some of this comes from religious offerings wrapped in non-biodegradable plastic).

In The Race to Save the River Ganges Reuters claims that the Indian government has not spent most of the money that it has promised to cleaning the Ganges. In fact untreated sewage is still being dumped in the river in huge quantities. The Reuters report includes an animated map which traces the course of the river Ganges from the pristine waters at its source in the foothills of the Himalayas to its entry into Bangladesh. This map also shows the extent of the Ganges' tributaries across Tibet, Nepal and Bangladesh. A population density overlay on the map shows how the river basin is a vital source of water for over 400 million people. A polluted Ganges is a very big problem to millions of people.

Under the story map in the Reuter's report is a fabulous flow map of the river Ganges. As you scroll through this flow map of the river you can see where sewage-drains, factories and other rivers pour pollution into the river as it moves downstream. There is an element of Minard's famous visualization of Napoleon's March on Moscow to this flow map. As you move down river on the strip map the size of the river grows to show the accumulated levels of wastewater discharged into the Ganges as the river flows across India. The daily amount of wastewater entering the river every day is 6.07 billion litres.

A Journey Through Famine in India

"All this day our noses were infested and our bodyes almost infected with a most noysome smell, which after search, wee found to come from a great pitt, wherein were throwne 30 or 40 persons, men, weomen and children, old and younge confuseldy tumbled in together without order or Coveringe" - 1630, Peter Munday, Itinerarium Mundii

In 1631 around 3 million people died of starvation & disease in the Indian state of Gujarat. This famine began in Gujarat after a long drought in 1630. In the following year, in 1631, crops were attacked by rats and locusts. 1631 also saw very heavy rains which led to an outbreak of many water borne diseases. It is reported that following these calamitous events the people were so desperate for food that human bones were ground with flour, cannibalism was frequent and people fed on corpses.

Peter Munday was an English merchant trader, traveler and writer. In 1630 in the employ of the East India Company Peter Munday traveled from Surat in Gujarat to Agra. On this journey Munday witnessed and wrote about the famine and its effect on the people. You can follow Peter Munday's journey and read the entries he made into his manuscript narrative Itinerarium Mundii on the interactive map Famine & Dearth in India and Britain.

You can follow Peter Munday's journey to Agra using the colored markers on the map. Each of these markers indicate an entry Munday made into his Itinerarium Mundii. The color of each marker indicates its score on the famine to plenty scale. If you select a marker on the map you can read Munday's first hand account of his journey through Gujarat and the famine.

You can learn more about the Gujarat famine and Peter Munday by clicking on the home button on the interactive map.

Delhi - A City Born of Partition

After the partition of India in 1947 half a million Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan arrived in Delhi. The arrival of half a million extra citizens changed Delhi for ever. In fact the impact of their arrival on the city itself can be observed by comparing the map of Delhi in 1942 to the map of Delhi in 1956.

Delhi - 1942 vs 1956 allows you to directly compare a street map of Delhi in 1942 with a street map of the city from 1956. This interactive visualization uses a circular overlay of the 1956 map which you can move around on top of the 1942 map to view how Delhi changed drastically in short a very short period of time.

The map is a neat visualization of the historical change witnessed by Delhi, which is explained further in the the Hindu Time's article The Decade that Changed Delhi. This article explains how large parts of modern day Delhi grew out of the post-partition refugee camps that sprung up on the edge of the city in 1947.

The Hindu Times article uses the same 1942 and 1956 maps to look closely at some of the new neighborhoods which grew out of the arrival of so many new residents after partition, It also includes a visualization which allows you to switch between the two maps to show the extent by which Delhi changed in such a short space of time.

Putting Sikh Soldiers on the Map

During the First World War over one million Indians served overseas. At least 74,187 Indian soldiers gave their lives in the war. Although the Sikh population was less than 2% of the total population of British India at the time of the First World War they made up more than 20% of the British Indian Army. The contribution of Sikhs to the First World War is commemorated in a new interactive map.

Soldier Map - Empire, Faith & War maps the records of 8,000 Sikh soldiers who fought in the Great War. Most of the data for the map comes from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s casualty database, which records the names of the 1.7 million men and women of the Commonwealth forces who died during the First and Second World Wars.

Sikh soldiers are shown on the map at their place of birth. Soldiers whose birthplaces aren't known have been placed on the map at India Gate in New Delhi, the British-built memorial to Indian soldiers who died in the period 1914 to 1921. If you click on a soldier's marker on the map you can read details about where and when they served, where they were born and where they are commemorated. Some soldier's markers may also contain links to a story page created by citizen historians who have discovered more information about  an individual soldier's life.

Also See

Mapping the Fallen of World War I

Flooding Kerala

In August over 200 people were killed in Kerala by the worst flooding to hit the Indian state in over 100 years. One reason for the dramatic flooding was that many of Kerala's hydroelectric dams were forced to release water with little warning to those who live downriver from the dams.

Reuters has been investigating why the waters in Kerala's dams were too high before the monsoon struck. In How Kerala's Dams Failed to Prevent Catastrophe the news organization has mapped the locations of all the state's dams and in particular the Idukki & Idamalayar reservoirs and the Periya River. Reuters argues that if the water levels in these two reservoirs had been lowered prior to the start of the monsoon then they could have coped with the rain that fell in the August storms.

Because the water levels in the Idukki & Idamalayar reservoirs were at 90% of their capacity before the August monsoon they both quickly reached capacity after the rains began. Both reservoirs were then forced to release water into the Periya River. The result was the severe flooding of communities living along the river.

Twenty Years of India Lights

From 1993 to 2013 the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) took nightly pictures of India from space. The University of Michigan, in collaboration with the World Bank, has examined all 20 years of these satellite images to analyze how light output has changed across India during this time.

India Night Lights is a project from the University of Michigan and the World Bank to visualize and provide access to this night lights data. The India Night Lights project includes an interactive map which allows you to compare a night light view of India for any two different dates. This allows users to make a direct comparison of the amount of light measured in 600,000 different villages across the country for any two different dates during the twenty years of available data.

As well as the interactive map India Night Lights includes a number of visualizations of different 'Stories' which emerge from the data. At the moment these stories include a data visualization of how Diwali lights up India every year, the impact of electricity development projects in India and how electricity is administered in Uttar Pradesh.

The India Night Lights Project also includes an API which provides free access to India's night light data. This allows developers to access the light output at night of 600,000 villages across India for the twenty years from 1993 to 2013.

Buses of Bangalore

Bangalore's Bus Routes is a mapped visualization of over 2,000 bus routes. The map shows the city's extensive bus network, color-coded by route numbers. Series 2 buses (buses whose bus number starts with 2) mainly support the west of the city. Series 1 buses operate in the eastern half of the city.

The interactive visualization allows you to view the individual routes of the city's 6 longest bus routes. Route 600 is the longest route, It makes a 117 km trip around much of the city. You can hover over individual bus-stops on the map to view which bus routes the stop supports. You can also hover individual routes on the map to view its route number. 

I particularly like the small multiples which show the Bangalore bus-stops with the most routes. These four smaller maps show the four bus-stops in the city which have the most bus routes passing through the stop. On each map all the routes a stop supports are highlighted. This results in the bus-stop being lit-up in the middle of its own bus network, with all the routes snaking out in every direction from the stop.

Free To Be in Delhi & Sydney

CrowdSpot is an interactive map based surveying tool. The platform is designed to elicit community feedback about locations in order to help enable better decision making. The platform can be customized to enable users to identify locations or to get them to vote about specific locations.

CrowdSpot has been used to get feedback on a number of different issues, including identifying locations where cyclists feel unsafe, to identify where transportation could be improved and to gain citizen feedback on city transit plans. It has also been used by women's groups to try to identify locations where women feel safe and unsafe.

Free to Be in Melbourne customized the CrowdSpot platform to discover how girls and women feel in Melbourne's public spaces. The interactive map based survey asked girls and women to identify the places they love, the places they avoid, where they feel safe and locations which could be improved in the city. Over 10,000 people visited the website and over 1,300 locations in Melbourne were identified on the map.

Following the success of the Melbourne project Free to Be is now looking for girls and women in Sydney to share their experiences of that city. Free to Be Sydney allows girls and women to identify 'good' or 'bad' spots in Sydney and to add their stories about different Sydney locations to the map. You can also browse the map to view all the good and bad locations added by other users.

Free to Be is also being launched in the capital of India. Free to Be Delhi works in exactly the same way as the Sydney and Melbourne maps. Girls and women can identify places in the city where they fell safe or unsafe by simply dropping pins on the crowd-sourced map. Free to Be hasn't stopped there either. It is now also available in Lima, Madrid and Kampala. In all these locations girls and women can now share how they feel in different locations in their own cities.

The Hate Crime Map of India

Amnesty International has released an interactive map that allows Indians to report hate crimes. Halt the Hate maps crimes which have been committed against people or groups in India because of their caste, religion or ethnicity.

Unfortunately the Halt the Hate map is a very basic interactive map. In fact it is less of a map than a yellow blob that happens to be in the shape of India. Obviously the main reason for using a map to document hate crimes is to enable users to browse and search by location. The fact that you can't zoom in on the map and because the map has no place-labels it is very difficult to search this map by location.

Because there is no marker clustering and all 489 hate crimes have been placed all on top of each other on the map it is actually impossible to select a huge number of the hate crimes from the map. You can partially overcome this problem by filtering the number of markers shown on the map. If you filter the hate crimes shown by year, motive, location etc. it does become a little easier to select individual markers on the map.

The Halt the Hate map is a great idea. It does therefore pain me to conclude that Amnesty International's hate crime map is a bit of a crime against mapping.

Help Partition India

Seventy years ago a British lawyer called Sir Cyril Radcliffe was asked to draw the border that would divide British India into two countries. Now it's your turn.

Radcliffe's new boundaries were formally announced in August 1947. The announcement left around 14 million people in the 'wrong' country. In the violence that followed around 1 million people lost their lives. After witnessing the chaos that followed his partition of India Radcliffe at least had enough shame to refuse his 40,000 rupee salary.

Al Jazeera don't have a 40,000 rupee salary to pay but they would like your help in dividing British India into two countries. In How were the India-Pakistan partition borders drawn? Al Jazeera has provided you with a map which includes information on where the Muslim, Hindu and Sikh populations live. You just need to draw the borders on the map to create two new countries.

After you have drawn your borders you will be shown the original Radcliffe Line.

India's Growing Cities

A little over 100 years ago Delhi wasn't even in the top 5 most populous cities in India. It is now the fourth most populated city in the world.

You can view the growth of India's cities on the Hindustan Times map of India’s 50 Most Populous Cities. This map shows the 50 most populous cities in 2011 and tracks how they have grown since 1901. The map includes a timeline which allows you to view the population size of each city for each decade since the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

As well as the interactive map the Hindustan Article on India's biggest cities includes an interactive list view of India's 15 most populous cities over the same time period. The data for both interactives comes from census results.

The Internet Shutdown Tracker

In India the government uses blanket internet shutdowns to try to curb violence and unrest in conflict ridden areas. The state believes that these bans on internet access are important preventative measures to stop the spread of violence.

Opponents of these internet shutdowns argue that because India has a flourishing digital economy such indeterminate denials of access to the internet cause businesses and the economy as a whole to suffer needless losses. The bans also effect the ability of journalists to report the news in crisis situations and can cause stress to people trying to contact friends and families. There is also the worry that the power to impose internet shutdowns can be used by the government to stifle legitimate opposition.

The Software Freedom Law Centre are trying to track the Indian government's use of internet shutdowns. One way in which they disseminate this information is through the Internet Shutdown Tracker interactive map. The map shows locations across India where the government has shutdown the internet.

The map also includes a breakdown of the number of internet shutdowns imposed by year. This tracker shows that in 2016 the government vastly increased the number of times it resorted to restricting access to the internet.

Mapping India's Members of Parliament

Natafilter is a searchable interactive map of members of India's Lok Sabha. It allows you to select any election constituency on the map to discover the name (and other details) about it's Member of Parliament.

Using the map you can view details about each MP's educational qualifications, net assets and (probably most interesting) the number of criminal cases in which they have been involved. You can filter the data shown on the map to show either the education, net assets or criminal cases for each MP.

The map uses scaled circular markers for each MP on the map and different colors to show the level of education attained, the net assets owned or the number of criminal cases. So, for example, if you select to just view the number of criminal cases on the map the biggest orange markers on the map show the MP's who have been involved in the largest number of criminal cases.


You can also find out information about every member of the Lok Sabha using MP Track's Members of Parliament Map If you enter an address into the map you can discover the name of the local MP. You can then click through to find out about the MP's attendance, participation in debates, questions asked and private members bills submitted, from the MP Track database.

The Members of Parliament Map includes a number of other options, which allow you to view the number of male or female MP's, to filter the MP's by age-range or tenure, or to show all the MP's belonging to each of the political parties.

The map uses Fusion Tables for the back end, while Derek Eder's popular Searchable Map Template was used to create the data filtering options.

Mapping the 1947 Partition of India

In 1947 the British Indian Empire was partitioned into the Dominion of Pakistan (which later split into Pakistan and Bangladesh) and the Union of India (later the Republic of India). One result of the partition was that 14 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were forced or decided to leave their ancestral homes and move their families to other countries. It was probably the largest mass migration event in human history.

The 1947 Partition Archive is documenting and sharing eye witness accounts of individuals affected by the Partition of British India in 1947. These individual stories of post-partition migration can be viewed on an interactive map. The map allows you to access oral histories of pre-Partition life, post-Partition migration and the ensuing life changes brought about by this migration.

If you select an individual marker on the 1947 Partition Archive Map you can click through to read the individual accounts of living through the partition. The markers on the maps, indicating the individual mapped histories, can be filtered by where the individuals migrated from or where they migrated to.

The India Air Quality Map

Ten Indian cities are in the top fifteen most polluted cities in the world, according to the WHO Global Urban Ambient Air Pollution Database. To raise awareness of the current air quality in Indian cities the Hindustan Times has created an air pollution map, which shows real-time readings from monitors throughout India.

The Hindustan Air Quality Map allows you to view real-time air pollution maps in 20 Indian cities. Each of the city maps use numbered and colored markers to show real-time readings from air quality monitors. The numbers represent the latest Air Quality Index score recorded by the monitor. The colors of the marker provide a quick overview of how safe or unhealthy the air quality currently is.

If your city doesn't appear on the Hindustan Air Quality Map you might be able to find nearby real-time air pollution readings on the World Air Quality Index map.

Rickshaws & Pigeons - Monitoring Air Pollution

Delhi has one of the worst air pollution records in the world. London has the worst air pollution record in Europe. Both cities however are developing interesting ways to monitor near real-time air pollution.

In Delhi Project Peppered Moth has equipped five auto rickshaws with internet connected air pollution sensors. These sensors measure air pollution every 30 seconds as they navigate around the city. The Project Peppered Moth website includes an interactive map which allows you to explore the readings from any of the rickshaws for any of the days that they have been in action.

The map shows color-coded markers for each reading taken by the sensors. I assume green markers indicate lower readings and red markers show higher readings.

London doesn't have as many auto rickshaws as Delhi but it does have thousands of pigeons. Pigeon Air Patrol has developed tiny backpacks fitted with air pollution sensors. It has also found a number of pigeons who have agreed to wear the backpacks on their daily commute around London.

The Pigeon Air Patrol website also includes an interactive map which presents the pigeons' tracks and the air pollution readings that the pigeons collected for what I assume was a test run. If you click on any of the markers on the you can read a summary of the air pollution level (although they all seem to say 'moderate pollution').

Now all we need is for both cities to put as much imagination into lowering air pollution as they are into monitoring it.