Tableau and the Politics of Political Maps - Visualising change in the population profile of India

Forty years (1971 to 2011) has seen the population profile of India change significantly. We increased in numbers from 566 Million to 1.21 Billion, but this growth was not uniform across the States – this can be seen in the simple filled map chart below where the colour encodes the percentage change in the relative population of the States.

This issue is getting media attention now as the 15^th Finance Commission tasked with recommending the share of each State from the divisible pool of taxes allocated to the States has been asked to use the population data of 2011 while making its recommendations (instead of the 1971 population as had been done by the earlier few Finance Commissions). This has far-reaching implications on the Finances of the States, and I am sure would be addressed appropriately by the Commission and the Government.

I write to highlight another issue – representation of India in the map charts made on Tableau. The default map shows India with the (painful) double lobotomy – the map of Jammu and Kashmir is not in keeping with the official map of India that we in India are so used to seeing.

When I first saw a map chart of India on Tableau about five years ago and pointed out this glaring error in the representation of India to the Tableau representative- he smilingly said – just change the Workbook Locale Setting to India, and voila – we see the official map now. This can be seen in the two figures below – and this is what I have been doing all these years. In a way, I was willing to acknowledge the existence of post-truth era we live in – Truth, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder.

But with the recent release of Tableau version 10.5, changing the workbook local to India no longer corrects the error in the default representation of the map of India.

This is unacceptable – Tableau is well advised to ensure that the map representation of India is in keeping with the official maps as released by the Survey of India, or risk losing one big segment of its user base in India.

I for one would not be using Tableau for any of the map-based visualisations – not with most of my visualisations being made for use by Civil Servants and Officers of Government of India.

Maybe PowerBI..

(PS – Changing the workbook locale to Pakistan does not change the Map of India any further, but changing the locale to China does another surgery in the North East – Arunachal Pradesh visibly shrinks)