The recent debate on 'free our data' highlighted issues of cost escalation in generating the 2011 England and Wales census database by the ONS and its alleged 'one time use' - estimated cost £12m. All this is due to the disagreements between three entities who between them have the complete database- the local authorities, the OS and the Royal Mail. Each values their creations as a commercial asset and hence are reluctant to share.

The labour work (aka digitisation of maps) for all these spatial databases is generally outsourced, and India holds monopoly in such contracts. India itself does not have a single centralised national spatial database yet, and efforts are on through the NSDI. Local authorities have managed to get their turf digitised and do have some applications running. Private vendors have managed to digitise all the village boundaries (over 600,000), but the data is not georeferenced!!! If a centralised contract is floated to generate a national spatial database for India, the financial outlay and quantum of work becomes staggering and no single company is capable of delivering the job (in a meaningful time frame). In fact the project will be valued at more than the total annual turnover of all Indian geospatial companies put together. This is the right time for India to take advantage of the global recession which will result in dwindling outsourced contracts from the 'developed' nations. It can use its g-skilled manpower for generating the first edition of 'THE' spatial database. All it needs is a synergy between the g-biggies and a mood to share. The '20 years time' which Jon Fairall mentions could just be reduced to 5...

The main drivers of environmental change and loss of biodiversity can be attributed to human impacts...