Maps in India were once a rare artifact. Although this trend is changing, they still remain pretty scarce. Moreover, the development of automatic cartography tools available through internet tend to hide what remains a lack of knowledge of space. A good example of this situation is the census map website (http://www.censusindiamaps.net/), which, despite its richness, leaves the reader his own, without any explanation, to figure out what might be the spatialization of census data.

The atlas presented here aims to help the reader go beyond this simple presentation of data by offering an analysis of South Indian territory. For this purpose, we used the SIFP database, which georeferenced the 1991 census data both at village and town level. To produce readable maps, which include more than 75.000 units, advanced mapping methodology was used (see details on this page). We have selected data most likely to interrest the widest possible audience (see the construction of the selected data on this page) and ordered them into 5 categories: Demography, Gender, SC/ST population, Economy, Agriculture.

Each map is available both at an overall South Indian scale and also at each of the four sourthern states. Each of these regional focuses offer a more precise view of the phenomena, and above all a specific set of analysis. This last point is important, as it gives the real dimension of this project. Each map is presented with an interpretation of the spatial distribution of the studied phenomena, written by different authors (see the list of the contributors).

Note that three more maps are available at the South Indian scale in order to help the reader who may not be familiar with South Indian spaces: districts, cities, and landscape, rivers & regions.

Last, some of the texts may be edited in the coming months. We decided however to put it online, so that everyone may have access to the maps.