blog@Yantrajaal

Before these names fade out of memory ... Front row : Mr Subramanium, Mr Tony D'Abrew, Fr Bouche, Fr Wavreil, Fr Desbrulais, Mr Verma, Mr Dey (Goba) Second row :Mr Nelson, X, Mr Sajal Banerjee, Mr Kamalendu Chaudhury[?], Mr Engineer, Mr Abraham[?], Mr Leslie Davey, Mr Mishra, Mr A K Samajpati, Mr A P Sarkar, Mr Carlyle Rosario, Mr Sushil Sarkar[?], Fr Maliyekal[?], Mr Nemai Sengupta[?], Mr Lobo, Mr Les D'Gama, X,X, Dr Magno Correa Back Row : Mr Redden, Mr T Vianna, Mr Gomes[?] Mr Rai[?], Mr Ganga Singh, Mr Balai Banerjee[?], Mr Chittaranjan Roy, Mr Tripathi, Fr L Hous , Mr Pinto, Mr Brown, Mr Gass -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- original picture with tags available at Les D'Gama's facebook timeline

India has a strange fascination for engineers and MBAs. Everybody wants to become one, or preferably both. So is the case with systems, or as they say in India, the IT sector. But this fascination is not because of any natural aptitude for these disciplines but simply because they help one to get a job in an otherwise dismal economy. This is unfortunate, because if we step back for a moment and think through  issues that haunt this country, it would seem that our salvation lies in leveraging this holy trinity to dig us out of the hole that we find ourselves in! Let us consider a few exemplary scenarios. Till the 1990s, telephones in India were a disgrace. While landline technology was readily available and widely used all across the developed world, we were still at the mercy of the corrupt and inefficient P&T department that ensured that very few of us had access to one. This changed dramatically with the arrival of cell-phones that  bypassed the constraints of th...

Displaying spatial data on maps is always interesting but most Visualisation tools do not offer facilities to create maps of India, especially at the state and lower levels. In this post, we will show how such maps can be made. The base data for such maps, the "polygons" that define the country, the states, the districts and even the talukas ( or sub-divisions) is available from an organisation called Global Administrative Areas or gadm.org . Country level files for almost all countries are available in a variety of formats including R and these are at three different levels. For India, these files can be downloaded as IND_admN.RData where R = 1,2,3. These will form the raw data from which we will create our maps. Unfortunately, the GADM files represent a truncated Kashmir. How I wish that the Government of India and the National Atlas and Thematic Mapping Organisation  would publish similar files for us. Anyway, we work with what we readily have ... Working with R, w...