Just when you thought being Poor in India was not enough

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:

1. Vijay, Raghavan & Mohammed Tarique : “Penalising Poverty :
   The Case of the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, 1959 “,  Vol. 53, Issue No. 22, 02 Jun, 2018 .