Geographical Reviews: National Atlas of India

Summary

This review evaluates the first "National Atlas of India," a cartographic milestone produced by the National Atlas Organisation under India's Second Five-Year Plan. The atlas comprises 26 color plates depicting the country's physical, economic, and social landscapes. The assessment examines its cartographic design, thematic scope, and innovations. The atlas adopts Hindi script for titles and legends—with English translations provided—and the metric system, breaking from colonial cartographic traditions. Maps are primarily rendered on Lambert’s conformal conic projection at scales ranging from 1:5,000,000 to 1:60,000,000, supplemented by numerous insets. Major contributions include the first comprehensive administrative map of nearly 2,800 minor civil divisions since 1881, a novel physiographic interpretation, and new thematic maps covering climate, soils (incorporating zonal concepts), forests, cash crops, industries, and transportation. However, certain plates suffer from poor color harmony, notably the rural population map whose density categories are nearly illegible. The atlas omits key demographic themes such as age-sex structure, internal migration, and growth rates, and data mainly span 1950–1956, with some reliance on earlier statistics. Overall, the atlas signifies a pioneering synthesis of Indian geographic data, balancing extensive new compilations with lingering design and content limitations. It inaugurates a larger national atlas project, with the promising English edition underway.