Apparently, being poor in India is not enough. Raghavan and Tarique (2018) have brought to light a very important issue which is new to me and its shocking that such law even exists in India. According to the World Bank Infographic on India’s poverty profile 1 in 5 Indians were poor in 2012 and so making laws that make their lives difficult is not a solution. The map below shows that majority of the states and union territories in India have an Anti-Begging law.
Is your state one of them? Is it justified ?
Data:
The data for the tile map is sourced from blogpost. I have used the data available on the blog and added a dummy column which 1 if there exist an anti-beging law and 0 otherwise. The data i have used is available here.
Shapefiles:
Readers would also need a shapefile of India to replicate this map. To learn to use shapefile in R , please refer to my previous blog posts .
Code:
library(gridExtra)
library(viridis)
library(geogrid) # for the grid/tile map
library(dplyr)
library(stringr)
# clean and transform shape file and literacy rate data
original_shapes <- read_polygons("india\IND_adm1.shp") # shape file
df <- read.csv("stateacts.csv", stringsAsFactors = FALSE) %>% select(region,dummy)
df[,1] <- sapply(df[,1],str_to_title)
original_shapes$NAME_1 %in% df$region
df[which(df[,1]=="Andaman And Nicobar Islands"),1] <- "A & N Islands"
df[which(df[,1]=="Dadra And Nagar Haveli"),1] <- "D & N Haveli"
df[which(df[,1]=="Delhi"),1] <- "Delhi (UT)"
df[which(df[,1]=="Daman And Diu"),1] <- "Daman & Diu"
df[which(df[,1]=="Orissa"),1] <- "Odisha"
df[which(df[,1]=="Uttaranchal"),1] <- "Uttarakhand"
df[which(df[,1]=="Jammu And Kashmir"),1] <- "Jammu & Kashmir"
original_shapes$NAME_1 %in% df$region
colnames(df) <- c("NAME_1", "dummy")
original_shapes@data <- left_join(original_shapes@data, df , by="NAME_1")
# Create a choropleth map:
clean <- function(shape) {
shape@data$id = rownames(shape@data)
shape.points = fortify(shape, region="id")
shape.df = merge(shape.points, shape@data, by="id")
}
result_df_raw <- clean(original_shapes)
rawplot <- ggplot(result_df_raw) +
geom_polygon(aes(x = long, y = lat, fill = dummy, group = group)) +
coord_equal() +
scale_fill_viridis(option = "magma", direction = -1) +
guides(fill = FALSE) +
theme_void()
rawplot # generates the map
# seed 1
new_cells_reg <- calculate_grid(shape = original_shapes, grid_type = "regular", seed = 1)
resultreg <- assign_polygons(original_shapes, new_cells_reg)
result_df_reg <- clean(resultreg)
regplot <- ggplot(result_df_reg) +
geom_polygon(aes(x = long, y = lat, fill = dummy, group = group)) +
geom_text(aes(V1, V2, label = ABB), size = 4, color = "white") +
coord_equal() +
scale_color_viridis(discrete = TRUE, option="D") +
guides(fill = FALSE) +
labs(x = NULL,
y = NULL,
title = "States with Anti Begging Laws",
caption="@opendataandr",
subtitle = "Source: https: //blog.ipleaders.in/anti-begging/")+
theme_minimal()+
theme(
text = element_text(family = "Ubuntu Regular", color = "#22211d"),
axis.line = element_blank(),
axis.text.x = element_blank(),
axis.text.y = element_blank(),
axis.ticks = element_blank(),
axis.title.x = element_blank(),
axis.title.y = element_blank(),
panel.grid.major = element_blank(),
panel.grid.minor = element_blank(),
plot.background = element_rect(fill = "#f5f5f2", color = NA),
panel.background = element_rect(fill = "#f5f5f2", color = NA),
legend.background = element_rect(fill = "#f5f5f2", color = NA),
panel.border = element_blank()
)
regplot
References:
- Vijay, Raghavan & Mohammed Tarique : “Penalising Poverty :
The Case of the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, 1959 “, Vol. 53, Issue No. 22, 02 Jun, 2018 .
Atmajit Gohil 