Maps matter — just ask the African Union, which is waging a war for fair cartographic representation. A look at the popular Mercator map that we all recognise will reveal that the African continent, which, in reality, is roughly 1.8 times the size of Russia, appears to be only as big as Greenland, an island that is actually over 14 times smaller than it. Created by the Flemish cartographer, Gerardus Mercator, the contentious map was drafted to help Europeans navigate the seas more easily but ended up distorting landmasses.
Over four centuries after Mercator, maps continue to be warped — in the mind. Places, directions, routes and landmarks have become a jumbled mass in the brain that can be sorted only by a disembodied voice reciting sterile instructions. For instance, a recent survey in the United Kingdom revealed that in an age when the planet is more well-mapped than ever before — even the depths of the oceans, hitherto uncharted territory, are now being plotted in detail — maps have lost almost all meaning to youngsters; even adults can no longer visually read maps. In fact, the human hippocampus, which is responsible for spatial awareness and orientation, is shrinking because of overt reliance on GPS apps.
Such ‘spatial cognitive deskilling’ has a more profound impact than houkou onchi or direction deafness as the Japanese call it. While the tech bros of Silicon Valley boast that children will now no longer know what it means to get lost — GPS trackers and maps exist for infants as young as six months — the reality on the ground is stark. A global research project by National Geographic revealed that in the lifetime of the last four generations, lack of spatial awareness has meant that children have gone from roaming up to a radius of 9.8 kilometres from home to an average of just 0.2 kilometres, often spending less time outside the unmapped territory of their own house than prison inmates do outside their cells. There has been a subsequent rise of 50% in agoraphobia — anxiety triggered by crowded places, open spaces, public transport, or even leaving the house alone — and it has affected children’s mental and physical health. Such SCD also drives biophobia, an avoidance, even fear, of the natural world that leads to indifference — hostility — towards environmental conservation.
Closer home, a similar study on map-reading skills conducted by an NGO in Murshidabad threw up an interesting finding. Schoolchildren up to Class X could easily point out where the Krishna river or the Aravalli range was but could not draw a map on how to reach the closest park without relying on Google Maps. Their senior peers from Classes XI and XII had in-depth knowledge about Banas Kantha and Sirohi — these fall on the border of Gujarat and Rajasthan and are part of the topographical study in the Geography syllabus — right down to rock outcrops and tiny temples, but had no inkling of their local geography.
The gap lies in a lack of interest in mapping the local. Few children are asked to sketch their school campus, their street network, or their ward boundaries even though the National Curriculum Framework 2023 emphasises experiential geography. Yet evidence shows that when children are taken on walking tours around their neighbourhoods and asked to map these, they engage more deeply with concepts such as space and direction and retain more knowledge. Translating lived experience into a two-dimensional sketch is cognitively powerful and has a positive impact on the hippocampus.
Local map literacy is also about civic competence — it trains young citizens to navigate floods or cyclones, to look up from their phones around their neighbourhoods and hold local governments accountable, and to recognise the signs of climate change. Without it, India risks raising a generation that can locate Ladakh on a wall map but cannot find its way around the block.
