India Rules the World Map

This animated cartogram resizes countries around the world according to their annual number of births.

In this “natal map” of the world, India appears as the largest country, with over 23 million babies born each year - roughly equivalent to the entire population of a country such as Chile (about 20 million people). China, with 9.54 million births per year, and Nigeria, with 7.51 million births per year, are the second and third largest countries on this re-imagined world map.

Canada and Russia become almost invisible on the world map of countries sized by the annual number of births. Russia is a very wide, west-to-east, stretched country. When its area is shrunk to reflect its relatively small number of births, the cartogram compresses its height far more than its length, leaving a long, thin almost invisible ribbon. In contrast Angola, which has a similar number of annual births to Russia, is more compact to begin with. So when it shrinks, it is still a more visible landmass.

This birth cartogram was created on Go-Cart, a map creation tool for making cartograms - maps where countries or regions are resized according to a data variable such as population, GDP - or births. With Go-Cart you don't need any coding skills to create cartograms, you can just upload your data and use the built-in maps to generate a cartogram in a matter of seconds.

The World Population Cartogram is another example of a map created on Go-Cart. On this cartogram countries are resized by their total population.