On Saturday, a group of students from IIT Madras and Stella Maris college, summer interns with Transparent Chennai, set out for a heritage mapping session. By visualising data and information that is otherwise found in voluminous reports, Transparent Chennai advocates for better planning and conservation of the city’s heritage and we were excited to be a part of this. We set out early on Saturday with lists of heritage buildings, their sketchy descriptions, GPS devices and cameras. Our aim was to find some of the lesser known sites hidden in the nooks and corners of the city.

Pachiappa’s College building standing its ground amongst shops and hoardings

We had decided to explore George Town and were looking forward to unearthing some untold stories from its maze of streets and by-lanes. Wandering around George Town was in itself an incredible experience, even for the true blue Chennai-ites! The smells, the sounds and the sights were quite amazing and a whole world away from the Chennai we all knew and were used to. It was magical to walk through the quaintly named streets, which had survived repeated waves to reclaim their Indian-ness, lined with buildings built in a medley of architectural styles. No street or alley is quite without its own story – George Town is that richly steeped in history. In fact, if one were to ignore the traffic and the other signs of modernity, George Town would probably look exactly as it did in a hundred years ago! Unfortunately, we could not help but notice the way in which several of these historic buildings had been defaced, mainly by commercial use. We can only imagine what the imposing façade of Pachiayappa’s College School might have looked like a hundred years ago, or how the statue of Cornwallis might have proudly stood in its now decrepit cupola.

Looking inside Cornwallis’ Cuppola

What had initially been planned as an early morning excursion ultimately took till late afternoon, as we wandered deeper and deeper into George Town, enamoured and enchanted. Needless to say, we lost our way several times in the meandering by-lanes of history. Many buildings were referred to by names different from the ones in our list, pronounced differently by local residents and barely resembled the descriptions we had! We ended up walking past  a building we had been looking for innumerable times, before we were able to recognise it! Mishaps apart, our mapping exercise was quite fruitful and we identified and photographed close to forty heritage buildings in the area!

Lone wall standing – the remains of a building in Fort St. George
The King’s Barracks – now serving as a store house for the army

High on enthusiasm, we decided to visit Fort St. George that evening. It was an entertaining visit, albeit disheartening. The staff in the innumerable offices housed there had no idea about any of the buildings we were looking for and pointed us in the direction of buildings that “lots of people photograph”! For instance, having split up into four pairs in order to cover the area faster, each pair ended up identifying the erstwhile “Chaplains’ house”! We were relieved to find a museum expecting to meet somebody who could regale us with stories about the Fort, but were sorely disappointed by the lack of knowledge and interest by the staff. Despite the museum having several interesting photographs and documents displayed we were unable to get good quality photographs since the inside of the museum was poorly lit and we were not allowed to use a camera flash. As appalling as this lack of documentation and interest within the Fort was, it was even worse to realise that the King’s Barrack’s – a stately and magnificent building – had been converted into a storehouse by the army! Many other buildings were in serious disrepair and looked like they had seen the worst in the 300 – 400 years of their existence. The army’s presence precludes the public from walking the area for fear of being “security threats”, which surprisingly would dissipate if we furnished the authorities with letters of introduction from our institutes!

Having realised that mapping the buildings within Fort St. George was proving to be quite futile, we decided that we would return another time, better prepared. On the whole, it was a thoroughly satisfying day, having seen a rarely known side of Chennai. Over the next couple of weekends we will walk down other streets of Chennai, looking for lesser known buildings that were witness to many events and hosted important personalities, and possibly hearing stories of love, tragedy, deaths, births, marriages, political alliances. After all, what is a city without its people and how can we do our bit to preserve this city’s rich cultural and built heritage.

- Written by Suraj Nair, Summer 2012 intern with Transparent Chennai and student at IIT Madras

Most of us inherently trust maps, but maps are actually ‘manipulated reality,’ reality as the map-maker wants us to see it. In India, we go one step further. For a map-maker working with government data, maps are the reality that we can piece together from the clutter of government data sources.

While working with maps for several projects, including with the Transparent Chennai project (www.transparentchennai.com), I too am forced to try and represent reality or come as close to reality as possible. However, when working with Indian data and maps, even without discussing technical issues such as different projection and coordinate systems, more often than not, the simplest task becomes a headache. As a simple example, try ‘googling’ the number of districts in India. From various sources you would come up with 593, 596, 626, 631, 640, 642 etc. While we are familiar with some of the changes our government has made, such as the creation of Uttarakhand (or is it Uttaranchal? more on names later) and Chhattisgarh, most of us would not know of the many changes happening to districts in the country. Taking just the census years from 1961 onwards, the number of districts increased from 339 in ’61 to 359, 414, 472 and finally 594 in 2001. The number today in 2011 could be 600 if you go with the Department of Land Resources, Ministry of Rural Development[1] or maybe 626 or 627 depending on which page of the SAME government owned website[2] you want to believe!

So what does one do when there is data pertaining to a particular year which is to be displayed thematically on a map? Take a dataset of any year and Murphy’s Law will ensure your map is of another year. What do you do with a district such as Ariyalur in Tamil Nadu which features in Census 2001. If you have data pre-2001, you will spend hours figuring out that Ariyalur was part of Tiruchirapalli in 1993 which was then split into 3 districts in 1995 (Karur, Tiruchirapalli and Peramblur). Come 2001 and Peramblur was split into Peramblur and Ariyalur so the once single district in 1993 is now four districts in 2001. But its now 2011 so why look so far back, you say. Fair enough. We have Ariyalur in 2001. Now 2002 comes along and we go back to a combined Peramblur! So Ariyalur disappears! What do you do now with your latest map? You can’t even map the most basic of data sources, the census! But wait, Ariyalur is making a comeback! Forward to 2007 and it reappears! Match your data to your map or your map to your data or just give up?

Let’s take a break from boundary issues for a while and look at names. District names are well… just names right? But if you are trying to automate the matching of data, the name of a district assumes deadly headache-inducing powers. We have already seen how using district codes from Census data is pretty pointless, so we are left with only district names to work with. Anyone who has done a bit of work with maps/ data would have suffered through districts which could be prefaced with West, Paschim, Paschimi; or East, Purbi, Purab, Purba; North, Uttar, Uttara; or South, Dakshina, Dakshin. One could say, no big deal – we know north, south, east, west, just use find-replace operations, problem solved. But what do you do with Alappuzha, Aleppy and Alleppey, or Kannur, Cannanore and Kanoor, or Kollam and Quilon, or Kozhikode and Calicut, or Thiruvananthapuram and Trivandrum, or Thrissur and Trichur? And that’s just from the state of Kerala. In our very own Tamil Nadu, that southernmost place that every 12 year old knows of could be written as Kanyakumari, Kannyakumari, Kanniyakumari if we stick to official names. If the creator of a dataset has split the name into two words or misspelt it, then there are many, many more permutations! But at least they sound similar. What about Sivaganga? It could be Sivagangai or (get this) Pasumpon Thevar Thirumagan or Pasumpon Muthuramalinga Thevar!!

Name-games over, let’s get back to our boundaries, but this time going down to lower levels of administrative boundaries to face some more conundrums. Even if you manage figuring out the difference between blocks, taluks, tehsils and mandals you can rest assured Mr. Murphy and his law will be around to see to it that you have block data and taluk maps. Go down a level or two more to city level and you are guaranteed to have to choose from two or more sources. First, one has to understand the difference between zones, divisions, wards, assembly and parliamentary constituencies and various other terms for varying urban entities and their classifications. For e.g. try to get ward boundaries of Chennai. The Census ward boundaries and the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) boundaries are so vastly different that there is no reconciling the two. Visit our ‘build a map’ page <http://www.transparentchennai.com/buildamap/> and select ‘Census data by ward boundaries >> Ward boundaries only” and “Ward Boundary (from 2008 CMDA Second Master Plan)” for instant confusion! Obviously, if one is trying to show census data thematically on a map one can’t use the CMDA boundaries even though they seem to correspond better to other sources.

Or try to figure out assembly constituencies. Earlier, the Election Commission helpfully published constituency shapefiles on their site but has now discontinued the practice. So one has to either digitize from other pdfs or jpegs or try to build up shapefiles from published information. One such source is the Chennai corporation website[3] which provides a table listing which wards fall into which assembly constituency. Another source is the website of the Office of the Chief Electoral Office, Tamil Nadu which publishes a pdf giving the same information – which wards fall under which assembly constituencies[4]. So we proceeded to make maps using both sources. The results are below.

Each colour in each of the above maps represents an assembly constituency. So ideally, both maps should look like similar sets of a jigsaw puzzle – even if different colours are used for each piece, their shapes and sizes should be the same. Just one of them – Saidapet towards the lower left corner – looks similar in both maps, but closer inspection reveals a difference of one ward between the two maps. Thus, if one derives maps from the two sources, not a single constituency has a boundary which can be accepted as confirmed from two sources. An attempt to triangulate using a third source may very well throw up a third unique map! Factor in the fact that the city of Chennai is currently in a phase of expanding its city limits to include various village panchayats and all you can do is hope you have enough aspirin to deal with the headache that is sure to follow.

Akshai Abraham with inputs from Prabu R.

[1] http://dolr.nic.in/hyperlink/distlistnew.htm

[2] http://districts.nic.in/ and http://districts.nic.in/dstats.aspx

[3] http://www.chennaicorporation.gov.in/zone/zoneAddress.htm

[4] http://ceotamilnadu.nic.in/forms/int3.pdf

Transparent Chennai recently created a new map of police stations for Chennai’s residents. Information on local police is scattered all over the internet but there isn’t a one stop source for this kind of data. And that’s why Transparent Chennai decided to create a layer that collates and presents all necessary police related information on a single map/layer. Let’s look at some existing literature on police and law enforcement in Chennai.

Chennai Police is categorized into ‘city’ police and ‘suburban’ police. Chennai and suburban Chennai (outside the corporation boundary but inside the development authority area) are two districts in the northern zone. The city has 9 subdivisions, 29 circles, and 119 police stations of which 27 are (All Women) police stations.[1]

While the suburb police have 3 subdivisions and 13 circles, 49 police stations of which 8 are All women police stations.[2] The city today has a total of 163 police stations.

A brief history of police presence in Chennai:-

The existence of police can be traced back to 1659, when the British engaged Pedda Naik to guard the town of Madraspatnam with assistance from peons. The board of Police was constituted in 1770 by the then Governor Josios DuPre in order to deal with public nuisance, and maintain public health and order. In 1771, Governor Stratton appointed a “Kotwal” to control prices of commodities in the market and to discipline tradesmen.

Later in 1780, the post of Superintendent of Police (SP) was created to supervise the markets and to reduce prices of provisions. In1806, Walter Grant became the first regularly appointed SP with three police magistrates. The police forces have gone through various changes and reforms not since then. While they were called the Imperial Police during the British Raj, today they are collectively called the Indian Police Force.

Standards: According to UDPFI(Urban Development plans formulation and implementation guidelines) standards, there should be one police station measuring 1.5 hectares between every ninety thousand people and one police post between every forty to fifty thousand people inclusive of residential accommodation (to keep the prisoners for a short while). There should be one district office and jail between ten lakh people and a police line for every twenty lakh population.

The Chennai metropolitan area has a population of 73.44 lakhs (2001 census) and163 police stations surpassing the standard requirement of number of police stations. However, they do not qualify the norms for requisite space indicated in the standard. Chennai has 12 district level offices and the largest central prison in the country in Puzhal. There are 2 police lines the suburban and the city police. Although Chennai does not meet all the UDPFI standards, it has a good police presence in the city.

Mapping: Although crime can be reported by simply dialling 100 on your phone, one still needs to go to the area police stationfor filing an FIR (First Information Report). Hence, we decided to create a platform wherein users could access all relevant information needed to file an FIR. Information containing address, contact number, contact person was gathered from different websites in an alphabetical order. Then all police stations (both city and suburb) were manually located and marked using Google Earth. Some of the police stations were already marked on Google maps and Wikimapia.  Using geographical information system, stations were marked on satellite images (Google earth). This was necessary to avoid confusion as several police stations were situated in a locality that did not bear the name of the area the police station is to serve. Example:  The Amjikarai police station is near the Anna Arch on the 3rd Avenue road which is in Annanagar area.

Since the location details were taken from other websites, authenticity is not guaranteed. We request our site users to kindly update us in case if we missed or wrongly marked a police station.

One can view this map through ‘Build A Map’ feature on our website. Clicking on ‘Police Stations Layer’ will give take you to this map. There are 163 police stations in all which have been categorised into city police, All Women police station, Suburban and All Women suburban police stations. The following chart indicates the data:

S.No. Type of Police Station Total Numbers mapped unmapped Name of the unmapped  police stations
1 Sub Urban 41 35 6 Madhavaram, Pallikaranai , Peerkankaranai,Red hills, Santhangadu, Thiruverkadu
2 Sub urban Women Police Station 8 3 5 Avadi, Ennore, Madhavaram, St. Thomas Mount, Tambaram
3 City Police 87 69 18 Basin Bridge, Dr. R.K.Nagar, Government Estate Area, Guindy, Harbour,Kasimedu, Kodangaiyur, Kumaran Nagar,Marina,Muthialpet, North Beach, Nungambakkam, Otteri, Pattinapakkam,Periamedu, Port Marina,Secreteriate Colony, Thiruvika Nagar, Triplicane,
4 All Women city police station 27 1 26 Adayar, Annanagar, Ashok Nagar, Aynawaram, Egmore, Flower Bazaar, Guindy, Harbour, High court, Kilpauk, MKB Nagar, Mylapore, Peravellore, Pulianthope, Royapettah, Royapuram, Saidapet, T-Nagar, Teynampet, Thirumangalam, Thousand Lights, Triplicane, Vadapalani, Vepery, Villivakkam, Washermanpet.
Total 163 108 55

Please help us map the remaining police stations, especially women police stations, through our user driven layer.

[1] http://www.tnpolice.gov.in/

[2] http://www.tnpolice.gov.in/chennaisuburbanpolice/

Roshan Toshniwal

In December 2010, Reclaim Our Beaches (ROB), a local youth initiative in the city, contacted Transparent Chennai to see if TC could, in any way, help strengthen a proposal that they were sending to the Chennai Corporation on the need for dustbins and toilets on Elliots and Valmiki beaches. A methodology for data creation was devised that would benefit both organizations. For ROB, it was the creation of spatially precise data that buttressed the need for dustbins and toilets, and for TC, it served as a starting point for infrastructure and pollution mapping of Chennai’s coastline. This blogpost will tell our readers about how the data created helped strengthen ROB’s proposal to the Chennai Corporation.

Dustbins and Toilets on the Beach:

ROB’s campaign, which involves placing dustbins and toilets on the beach as a first step towards a healthier beach environment, led them to a meeting with the Chennai Corporation, a civic body responsible for maintenance of public spaces and amenities in the city among other things. The meeting ended with the corporation suggesting that ROB submit a proposal stating the nature of problem and related demands concerning Chennai’s beaches.

While thrilled at the opportunity to come up with a sound proposal that would put dustbins and toilets on the beach they soon realized that it was not an easy task to create a convincing proposal especially since they were an unregistered organization. The need to make their proposal more persuasive was why they initially contacted TC.

TC and ROB:

At TC, a methodology was devised for obtaining information on the formal and informal uses of Elliots and Valmiki Beaches that would help ROB to: 1. help reinforce the need for dustbins and toilets; 2. provide insight into the most effective locations for the same.

How so? Let us explain by using Elliots beach as an example.

While ROB already had data on the amount of trash along the coastline, this data was repackaged to spatially showcase how dirty the beach was during different days and times. We did this by mapping sites where trash had accumulated on different days to get a spatial sense of the problem. In our study, a trash accumulation site was defined as any area where more than 5 pieces of trash were found together.

These sites were mapped by ROB volunteers on Monday 20/11/2010

These sites were mapped by ROB volunteers on Sunday 02/01/2011

As you can see, these maps provide a strong spatial representation of the problem of trash on Elliots beach. What’s even better is by overlaying this data with the existing neelmetal dumpsters and government operated dustbins in the area, one can easily see how the present waste management system is inadequate.

Similar representations of informal urine hotspots were mapped and overlaid with information of public toilet facilities in the area to present the need for more toilets.

To help in locating ideal places for trash bins a heat map containing a point density algorithm was used to spatially show the most concentrations of trash thereby showing where trash bins would be most useful.

Example heat map using the trash accumulation data obtained on 20/11/2010

The same methodology was used to stress the need for toilets as well. We hope that these maps will help ROB’s proposal to the Corporation and eventually result in more dustbins and toilets on the beach.

Go to Build A Map feature on our website to explore our Beach Layer! Please do write to us and give us feedback on our methodology.

- Siddharth Hande