COMMENTARY
Critical Cartography and India’s Map Policy Swasti Vardhan Mishra
Looking at maps as instruments of sovereignty and evaluating them with the tools of critical cartography, this commentary analyses the unbalanced implementation of India’s National Map Policy. The policy ostensibly directs its energy towards regulating and safe-keeping of internal sovereignty.
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ritical cartography is referred to as the alternative view of understanding maps through social theories. Maps were earlier understood only through the scientific positivism rationale (Crampton and Krygier 2006; Crampton 2001; Kitchin et al 2009; Kitchin et al 2013). Critical cartography, which began in the late 1980s and the 1990s, questions the motives of mapmakers and the project of mapping from different critical vantage points, thus assigning maps an identity and associated nature. The present commentary draws from the ideas of J Harley (1988, 1989) in understanding the implications of the map policy, thereby critiquing its epistemology of maps. What Went Wrong?
Swasti Vardhan Mishra (
[email protected]) is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Geography, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan.
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India’s National Map Policy (NMP) (GoI 2005), published in 2005, is a somewhat liberal legacy of the earlier more stringent policies. However, while it talks of removing restrictions from the distribution and use of topographical maps, it does so half-heartedly. Viewed from the perspective of critical cartography, this
stance seems clear, but also reveals its negligence of the digital interconnectedness of map-makers and users. The NMP, driven by the Survey of India (SoI), plans to form a National Topographic Database consisting of Open Series Maps (OSM) and Defence Series Maps (DSM). The maps differ on two crucial aspects. First, topographic details in OSMs are partly obscured so as not to jeopardise national security. Calling it “dilution of accuracy,” the policy liberates the DSMs completely from such dilution. Second, the projection used for OSMs is Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM), giving way to international convergence in map-making practices. On the other hand, DSMs are projected, besides UTM, in polyconic projection using Everest datum, thus limiting complete OSM–DSM convergence. Besides, jurisdiction of cartographical matters related to the external sovereignty of the nation—in the form of securing the projection of international boundaries— lie with the SoI. The agency has regulatory power over the accuracy of maps produced in the country in terms of their conformance to the NMP, and also over the maps that are published outside and imported. However, the policy falters on two fronts; first, on oversteering internal sovereignty, and second, on compromising with external sovereignty. J Harley emphasised the power of maps as an instrument of sovereignty
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with the state as a “principal patron of cartographic activity” (1988: 284). And, while reiterating this power, Harley (1988: 290) talks of the “silences” as “hidden political messages,” where depiction of some places is withheld for one reason or the other. The NMP, while implicitly subscribing to Harley’s contention with map-making, limits the topographic information reaching the citizens of the country. The OSMs are devoid of contour lines and reference grids, and certain contextual civil and military “Vulnerable Areas and Vulnerable Points.” Such areas and points are those sites whose intactness is considered integral to national security. Adding to it, the policy limits selling of maps portraying international boundaries—these cover approximately 40% of the country (Lahiri 2014). The Common Cartographer Though the policy ostensibly subscribes to one of the two punches of critical cartography (Crampton and Krygier 2006) —a map as an instrument of power—it bluntly avoids the second punch. The second punch is all about the transition in mapping, and the drift of mapping practices from the hands of the virtuoso to the commoners. It is referred to as Volunteered Geographic Information (Goodchild 2007) and is part of democratisation of mapping practices (Kitchin et al 2009), where cartographers are common people, without any certificates in cartography; the maps they create entwine with their everyday lives. Bypassing this transition is the policy’s biggest mistake as the very motive of national security stands defeated when internetbased satellite imageries enable one to gauge the proximity of any “vulnerable point” very easily. When such issues are raised with the nodal agency they explain the imprecision of such open access domains, forgetting that India’s security threats always had a terrestrial character. Mobile mapping solutions nowadays enable users to map and search in their own ways and terms. Commoner people—without awareness of the NMP’s provisions—practice many such cartographies which are deemed illegal from the policy perspective. However, of late, the nodal agency of the NMP has Economic & Political Weekly
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started asserting itself, and in 2013 filed a First Information Report with the police against Google’s Mapathon contest. Google launched a contest in February 2013 in which the contestants were asked to map their neighbourhoods; the best among them were promised awards. However, this crowdsourcing endeavour had an asterisked clause which stated that contestants were left to their own devices if any legal issue were to arise. The issue gained prominence when Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) parliamentarians raised the issue on the floor of Parliament, and one of them even wanted to have Google booked. When the BJP gained absolute majority in the 2014 elections, the investigation was handed to the Central Bureau of Investigation, thus exaggerating the whole issue. The nationalist feelings and the exercise of national policy were both misplaced. There was lack of awareness of the more intricate and complex facets. Mapping the neighbourhood was assumed to be an infringement of the NMP, while forgetting the crowdsourcing of everyday lives, including, among others, address tagging, geotagging, and finding the shortest available route. A cursory look at Google’s map initiative, where even a narrow street name has a toponym, would have made the government understand its technical lacunae and misplaced clamour, when the maps it produces barely have such nuanced features. My concern here is with the overstringent steps taken by nodal agency with regard to OSMs and crowdsourcing. However, with the release of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy, 2012, it is expected that the classified
domain would be narrowed and more data will be divulged in the near future, thus facilitating the use of maps in everyday lives by novice cartographers. Cartographic Infringements On the contrary, the policy that also accounts for external sovereignty remains neglected. Referring to a number of cartographic contestations between India and Pakistan, I would like to reflect on the compromising stance of the policy with respect to Kashmir. While India terms the area with Pakistan as Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), Pakistan calls it Azad Kashmir which is autonomously administered—as is Gilgit-Baltistan, also a part of the Kashmir dispute. The fallout manifested, among others, as cartographic infringements between the two countries, and which, ostensibly, has not perturbed policymakers for long. Such cartographic infringements occur inside the countries as well. In 2012, it came to light that a map exercise book for grade III students in an Army Welfare Education Society school showed PoK as Azad Kashmir (PTI 2012). Besides, in 2013, a government official presented a map showing Jammu and Kashmir as part of Pakistan while convincing business houses to invest, and the same presentation was uploaded without necessary rectification (Times of India 2013). It is, thus, crucial to strategise in the right direction and in the right way. India’s cartographic indolence can be effectively countered once we internalise the alternative view of the science of cartography, namely, critical cartography. Viewing maps as a veneered tool through which geopolitical aspirations are gradually fructified,
EPWRF India Time Series Module on Insurance The Economic and Political Weekly Research Foundation has added a module on Insurance to its online database EPWRF India Time Series (EPWRFITS). The Insurance module provides time series and company-wise data under Life and Non-Life Insurance, seperately for both public and private sectors, starting from 2001. The module covers a large number of variables such as the number of offices, policies issued, premium, claims settled, and solvency ratios. Under the category of Life Insurance, company-wise data at the state-level on the number of offices and individual new businesses underwritten is included. Cross-country indicators like insurance density and penetration are given to enable international comparison. The periodicity of data for all variables is annual and has been sourced from publications such as the Insurance Regulatory Authority of India’s Handbook on Indian Insurance Statistics and annual reports. With this, the EPWRFITS now has 14 modules covering a range of macroeconomic and financial data. vol l no 31
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India should try to do away with some of the cartographic endeavours that are detrimental to its interests. It should also rely on retrofit-mapping (Mishra 2014) as the other possible way of tilting the contestation in its favour through use of the right hue, position, and text on maps which are visible online and in the print media. More importantly, the agencies concerned should try to liberalise the stern ways with which they try to curtail crowdsourcing endeavours for everyday use by common people, while filling the gaps that leave the country’s external sovereignty compromised. References Crampton, J W (2001): “Maps as Social Constructions: Power, Communication and Visualization,”
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Progress in Human Geography, Vol 25, No 2, pp 235–52. Crampton, J W and J Krygier (2006): “An Introduction to Critical Cartography,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, Vol 4, No 1, pp 11–33. GoI (2005): “National Map Policy, 2005,” Survey of India, Department of Science & Technology, Government of India, New Delhi. Goodchild, M F (2007): “Citizens as Sensors: The World of Volunteered Geography,” Geo Journal, Vol 69, No 4, pp 211–21. Harley, J (1988): “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments, D Cosgrove and S Daniels (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 277–312. — (1989): “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica, Vol 26, No 2, pp 1–20. “India (Political) 2001,” map, Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas at Austin, viewed on 30 April 2015, http://www.lib.utexas. edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/india_pol01.jpg Kitchin, R, J Gleeson and M Dodge (2013): “Unfolding Mapping Practices: A New Epistemology for Cartography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol 38, No 3, pp 480–96.
K itchin, R, C Perkins and M Dodge (2009): “Thinking about Maps,” Rethinking Maps, M Dodge, R Kitchin and C Perkins (eds), Oxon: Routledge, pp 1–25. Lahiri, M (2014): “Survey and Mapping in India: The Regulatory Framework: A Report,” ML Infomap, viewed on 30 April 2015, https://www. mlinfomap.com/Pdf/Survey&Mapping-Lahiri%202.1.pdf Mishra, S V (2014): Cartographic Contestation between India and Pakistan—With Regard to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, New Delhi: KW Publishers and University of Calcutta. “Pakistan (Political) 2010,” map, Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas at Austin, viewed on 30 April 2015, http://www. lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/ pakistan_pol_2010.jpg PTI (2012): “Pak-occupied Kashmir Shown as ‘Azad Kashmir’ in Class Three Text Book,” Times of India, 22 April, viewed on 30 April, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/ Pak-occupied-Kashmir-shown-as-Azad-Kashmir-in-class-three-text-book/articleshow/12825579.cms\ Times of India (2013): “Sahu’s Pak Problem,” 7 January, Ahmedabad, p 4.
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