A Toilet Map of India

In my previous post, I had mapped households across Uttar Pradesh, based on their ownership of basic census assets (a mobile phone upwards). I had then compared that map with one which looked at households with toilets across the state. The differences across regions in the second case were much sharper. And as I had pointed out in that UP post, access to toilet facilities correlates highly with a range of health indicators.

So I thought I would generalise that toilet map to the whole country. Here’s the result.

Around 47% of households across India reported having a toilet in the 2011 census, up from 36% of households in 2001. As the map below shows, the regions where a majority of households have a toilet are only a few – North and North-East India, Kerala and the Western Coastal region and parts of Gujarat. In addition, coastal Andhra and Nagpur are also significant. In the rest of the country, the larger urban centres form little ‘islands’ of privilege (in this regard) as compared with the areas around them.

(Apologies but this post may take a while to load on a slow connection, and/or if you are using a tablet or phone. Click or tap on the map to switch between 2001 and 2011. Hover your mouse over a tehsil to see its details. The greyed-out regions are those for whom data couldn’t be compiled, or those which are not relevant e.g. PoK)

Notes :

The map is based on the 2001 tehsil boundaries so I had to map the 2011 data to those boundaries. For the mapping I used the extremely helpful tables here. Your browser may throw up a security warning, but I think that’s because the gov.in domain managers haven’t renewed their site security certificate. But you proceed at your own risk.

The mapping across the census years is imperfect since I only did it with the data available at the sub-district level. Real accuracy would require mapping at the village level and then aggregating upwards but that’s really difficult and time-consuming.

For the map, I converted the shapefiles which come with the DevInfo software into SVG format for easier handling.

The toilets data is from the Census 2001 and Census 2011 tables.

Maps coloured using the d3 library, and the colours are from colorbrewer.