Wednesday, October 8, 2008

A planned subdistrict in Phitsanulok?

The file titled ccaatt by the Department of Provincial Administration (DOPA) contains all of the geocodes for the central government entites - provinces, districts and subdistricts. There are also some obsolete codes marked with an asterisk, and also several strange ones I am still not sure about.

But there is also one very strange one in this list, which gives the number 65080000 to the subdistrict Khok Laem (ตำบลโคกแหลม), Noen Maprang district, Phitsanulok province. Though it is not marked as obsolete, there is no such subdistrict, Noen Maprang has just 8 subdistricts in all other sources. The entry in the geocode list is already found in the oldest version of this list I could find with archive.org back from 2001, when DOPA was still named DOLA (Department of Local Administration). This subdistrict shows in none of the populations statistics from DOPA, nor was there any announcement in the Royal Gazette on it. The previous code 65070000 belongs to the subdistrict Wang Yang created in 1984, which gives only a very rough earliest date for the assignment of that odd geocode.

So I can only guess that this is (or was) a planned district which already got a geocode assigned yet wasn't created, and DOPA forgot to mark this entry with the asterisk as a special code or remove it from their list altogether. As there are similar codes for districts its a pity this seems to be only such subdistrict code which still can be found.

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