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Abstract
During the past ten years, Nepal has witnessed a rapid migration of people to urban areas from rural areas for the better living standards and resource utilization. The influx of people has compounded urban management and planning challenges. This has been particular problematic in areas that have attend urban status since the passage of the Local Self Governance act of 1996 by His Majesty’s Government of Nepal. That act places the burden of urban planning on a municipality’s governing bodies, but many newly created and designated urban areas, lack of appropriate tools to handle the existing information for a complex planning process.

To address the problem, I undertook a test project under the assistance and technical guidance of the Rural-Urban Partnership Programme (RUPP) a joint venture of HMG/N and the United Nations Development Programme to create a digital database and resource map for the Byass Municipality, which has a population of about 29,000 and is approximately 150 Km away from Kathmandu. This took place in between 20th September 1999 till 15th January 2002. The goal was to create an integrated information resource using GIS and GPS that would provide the municipality with the necessary tools to develop a comprehensive and appropriate framework to guide the planning and development of the city.

Building a GIS data for the municipality however was not a small feat, considering the municipal government itself did not have the proper maps to handle the various activities like land management, infrastructure, land use planning, river network e.t.c. I thus first gathered data and information from past and current research studies from the relevant organizations, including the city government, RUPP and the affiliated Projects.

To build the base map for the GIS I relied on a four topographic hardcopy maps of the area provided by RUPP. Those 1:25,000 scale maps also identified only six different land cover/landuse types in the region. The maps were scanned and then digitized manually for different theme like municipal and ward boundaries, landuse zoning, road and river networks, electricity utility line, industry and factory location, and social services buildings (educational facilities, public institutions, health services, and so forth). I converted all the resulting CAD layers to DXF files and then subsequently imported those into shapefiles in ArcView.

Because much of the resulting spatial information in the GIS was incomplete and five years out of date, my next task involved several site visits within the municipality with a GPS receiver. During these visits, I used GPS to verify the ward and municipal boundaries and to collect the building footprint positions for all social services buildings throughout the city. In this process, I mapped several new buildings not present in the 1996 topographic map and also obtained position information and for other facilities such as bus stops, landmarks, shops, hotel and temples.

With the spatial data in place, I then built a database of nonspatial (attribute data). The database included ward population counts and number of households data obtained from the municipality as well as data about demography, heritage, and trade amassed from various research studies and published documents pertaining to the region. I tabulated all the attribute data using a spreadsheet program, and saved the files in dbf format so that the data could be easily accepted and displayed by the GIS Softwares.

At the end GIS proved to be invaluable tool for handling the municipality digital base map and database, all in less than three months time. Government officials and staff need to be trained to use the GIS and interpret the maps, but the system provides a much-needed tool for assisting with the planning and urban management operations. Fortunately, overcoming the technology gap should progress quickly. The response to the GIS has been so positive that RUPP applied the resource mapping and conducting training in next eleven different municipalities where its support organizations are established. I am handling all the next various projects for preparing the database and conducting a week training programme in the respective Municipalities.

The municipalities planning section are happy to have a digital database and they are realizing the use and need of GIS in the concerned field.