Geographical record: The National Atlas of India

Ashok K. Dutt reviews the eight-volume National Atlas of India (National Atlas and Thematic Mapping Organization, 1982) as one of the best national atlases in the world and the most comprehensive, extensive and accurate atlas of India and South Asia, crediting S. P. Chatterjee's National Atlas Organization and color printing by the Survey of India. He records the extra-large format, seven scales from 1:25,000,000 for the Indian Ocean to 1:25,000 for city maps, four projections, and 274 maps on 220 sheets in seven categories, of which economic topics take 36 percent and agriculture is the largest single grouping, spread across volumes III, V, VI and VII. Volume content runs from general and political maps (I) through physical and geomorphological maps (II), climate, water and biogeography (III), population, transport and tourism (IV), land use and industry (V), agriculture (VI), social geography (VII) to history, culture and urban land use (VIII). The reviewer's criticisms concern the twenty-five-year compilation: population maps rest on 1951-1971 censuses without the 1981 census, place names and some 1960s transport plates are unrevised, industry is casually mapped with no macroregional or mesoregional sectoral coverage and no composite industrial-location maps, family-planning acceptance is not mapped (he suggests political sensitivity in the 1970s as a reason), agricultural data predate the green revolution so high-yielding varieties, pesticides, fertilizers and expanded irrigation are absent, and levels of economic development are not mapped at all. He also finds the twenty-one-color altitudinal scale of the physical maps hard to read, the crop-region map with twenty-seven crop combinations too complex, and the twenty-six agricultural regions cumbersome in color. City maps of Bombay, Delhi, Hyderabad and Madras and an Arabian Sea sheet were in press; the organization planned further sheets.