NFHS district-wise interactive map

 

In our series of interactive, educative and informative maps, we are happy to introduce district-wise map of NFHS data. To state the obvious, district map displays the district level progress of each indicator when we compare NFHS 5 and NFHS 4 data. But beyond obvious, the district map reveals the trends going beyond the boundaries of states. An example can be seen in the indicators of tobacco and alcohol consumption of NFHS 5. The alcohol consumption is higher in eastern India while tobacco consumption is higher in central India. This is a trend across the States. 

 

 

 

 Newsbharati will cover such interesting aspects in the upcoming articles in this series.

 

But first a note on the limitations of the district map will be in order. To map and compare districts presents difficulties at multiple levels. 

 

 

First is that new districts are created almost every year somewhere in the country. Over a period of five years this number becomes considerable. The newly created districts are not available in previous survey. Even districts created in the period of actual survey are not available in the latest survey. Since we are using latest district map we find that data on 17 districts is not available for NFHS 5. For example Mulugu district of Telangana state was formed on February 17, 2019 and is not available in NFHS 5. Further difficulty is that when a district is created it is either bifurcated part of some district or carved out of 2-3 districts. Thus a of new district may alter the data of old districts. The scale of these issues can be gauged from the fact that there were 707 districts when NFHS-5 survey was conducted, compared to 640 in the NFHS-4 survey. 

 

Although there are various methods used for distributing the parent district values to the new districts, we have taken the approach of showing ' data not available' for new districts. For parent districts we will update the data whenever it is possible without compromising with the accuracy of data, in coming period. At the moment, the 'data not available' color is seen in a large number of districts in Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana States, particularly in NFHS 4 and therefore in difference. In case of Gujarat many new districts were created in 2013 which were not reflected in NFHS 4. In Telangana and Andhra Pradesh many new districts were created in the period 2015 to 2020.

 

 

Another 'data not available' scenario is due to addition or deletion of indicators in surveys. NFHS 4 has published district data on 93 indicators while NFHS 5 has 104 indicators at district level data. Of course the changing indicators themselves reflect the ground reality. The Indicator of women having mobile phone has no significance before 2015 survey. The indicators on HIV were more significant in NFHS 3 of 2005 than NFHS 5. And sometimes data on some new indicator may not be available for many districts. As an example see indicator 63. Children with diarrhoea in the 2 weeks preceding the survey who received zinc (%). The data for this is available for very few districts in NFHS 5.