Maps of India : DIY with R and GADM data
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...