The proposal is to merge survey maintenance offices of Survey Department and district Land Revenue offices in one office. Survey Training Centre will act as Land Management Training Institution under the Ministry with the departmental status.
Land information system and Land archives department will newly be established in order to have an integrated Land information system with central level archived. The name of the Land revenue department will be changed as Land reform and Land management department after merging Land reform department into Land revenue department.
3. Technical development
Today surveyors are familiar with a new generation of surveying equipment and techniques. Traditional system of surveying and mapping has been replaced to semi-modern or modern techniques who can be characterised as "black box technology"
Giving results in real time and in digital form. Many of the surveying activities including field operation have been using "Push of Bottom" System with limited use of knowledge and experiences of the survey professionals. This technical evolution in our profession has influenced the instrumentation and techniques used in surveying and mapping. In Nepal, plane table surveying for cadastral survey is still popular. More than 2000 surveyors are still working on this technology. However, topographical surveying is carried out using aerial photos with photogrammetric analogue plotter and Geodetic surveying is still using triangulation traversing by theodolite and distance meter. Higher order geodetic controls and precision levelling works is carried out by precise theodolite and levels.
Attempts, to automate and make the surveying and mapping process more efficient, have also been going on for considerable time e.g. the use of digital mapping on cadastral, GPS methods for control points determination and use of computers for geographic land information system etc.
GPS methods for control points
Global positioning system (GPS) was used in the production of topographical base map on the Eastern Nepal Topographical base maps at 1:25 000 scale in the plane and 1:50 000 scale at the mountain. The aerial photography was taken with the help of kinematics GPS techniques in order to have the minimum control for the aerial triangulation singular on an unaccusable Himalayas part of the country. Similarly, the same method was used for the Western Nepal Topographical Mapping Project.
The extension of ground control for large scale cadastral maps is also carried out by GPS methods.
National topographic data base
The utilisation of digital geographic information has been growing fast in all sectors of the society of the world. Also, in Nepal this has given a great influence to the different organisations as well as in some of the sector of society. Recently, survey department has already prepared the specifications for geographic information service and national topographic data base in order to ensure the homogeneous quality and availability of needed geographic information with this national data base standard. Survey department runs its digital mapping applications on environment. Survey department is utilising cadcore/Tracer software for on-screen vectorsing and ARC/ Info as their editing and map use software. ARC/Info data base is used as data storage format. Digital geographic information is also used in producing graphic maps. The objective of the product specification is to ensure the sufficient information content for the user and the specification for topographic maps in scale 1:25 000 and 1:50 000 are aiming to fulfil the needs of users, as most updated maps of most of the regions of the country is easily available.
Reference
- Specification for Geographic Information Service and National Topographic Database Survey Department, June, 1999.
- National Mapping Issues and Strategies
Survey Department, July, 2000
- Introduction to Survey Department
A Report
