Mapping out social change In South India. A geographic information system and its applications.

This paper summarizes the stages of a GIS project applied to the 75.000 localities of South India. The emergence of GIS technology in a country like India comes up against many scientific, technical or institutional problems. The georeferencing of villages, for instance, required consi-derable effort because of the unavailability of reliable printed maps. Similarly, systematic examination of the census data has underlined their shortcomings and called for corrections of all kinds. This article chronicles some of these concrete and theoretical difficulties. The second part of the paper is devoted to cartographic and geostatistical applications to various fields of interest: geography of Sabarimala pilgrimage, health care in Andhra Pradesh, impact of urbanization on Tamil villages, sexual discrimination in Tamil Nadu, irrigation in South India or spatial autocorrelation measurements.