Grab the maps at NICNET highway
GIS Development Staff
National Informatics Centre, India’s premier organisation in the field of Information Technology provides state to art solutions to the information management and decision-support requirements of the government and the corporate sector.
National Informatics Centre (NIC), Planning Commission, Government of India has amply demonstrated its experience and expertise in integrating and implementing IT based systems with the working of user organisations. Name the area and NIC is there. It may be education, agriculture, commerce, custom & excise, finance, health or human resources, industry, passport, transport, judiciary, etc. The list is long. National Informatics Centre, India’s premier organisation in the field of Information Technology provides state to art solutions to the information management and decision-support requirements of the government and the corporate sector. The IT services provided by NIC cover consultancy, software development, systems support, network services, office automation, data management, training.
NICNET-NIC’s Computer Communication Network is one of the largest VSAT based networks of its kind in the world. Operating on C-band and high speed Ku-band, NICNET can be accessed through terrestrial linkages also, any time of the day. Around 700 locations in India, including all state capitals, district headquarters and selected commercial centres can be directly accessed through NICNET. It is connected to over 200 International Networks in 160 countries. NICNET, the largest Satcom Network in India acting as backbone IT infrastructure with more then 700 micro-earth stations and viable gateway to INTERNET is capable of providing value- added network services for resource management over KU band based national Info-highway.
GIS in NIC
NIC has set up facilities for processing of Remote Sensing data with programmes to utilise data from IRS and other satellites. The facility is aimed to provide High Performance Computing using the concept of Parallel Processing Technique through PARAM 9000 US in the area of image processing. Powerful software provides an environment to process and analyse satellite data images and their integration with other data sets obtained from Survey of India and use it for GIS applications. A sophisticated laboratory consisting of advance peripherals such as digitizer, plotter, scanner, etc. has been established to provide the basic infrastructure for GIS support. Projects are initiated in the area of agriculture, forestry and water resource management. A major component of the project under Remote Sensing programme envisages development of national level thematic data base. An indigenous software on NICNET would provide a powerful tool for processing images which would yield the thematic maps and strengthen GIS programme for spatial data analysis.
GISNIC
NIC uses NICNET to launch several infromatics systems in different areas using different servers. Appreciating the requirement and demand for the storage, analysis and display of complex and voluminous data, NIC has designed GISNIC ver 3.0 to provide the user with a complete state of art desktop solutions for retrieval, projection, transformation and analysis of both spatial and non-spatial data, so that the user is able to manipulate and manage coordinate and attribute data and produce thematic maps as well as tabular reports. The product is capable of generating and plotting various types of thematic maps (Flow lines maps, Choropleth map, piechart, bar chart) and performing geographic analysis such as creating buffer zones, performing polygon overlay, and manipulating tabular data. It can design and generate graphics or reports in both interactive and batch modes, plot multiple classes or database layers one over other and supports multi-lingual labelling and text annotation. Building a GIS database is one of the most labour intensive and time consuming aspects of any GIS application. Efficient tools for building and maintaining geographic data, reduce the overall cost of GIS. GISNIC provides integrated easy to use tools for feature based digitising, attribute data entry, editing, validation and cleanup.GISNIC generated maps can be very effective means of information transfer for policy makers to take planning decisions. GISNIC has made possible the integration of information about various tourist centres alongwith appropriate photographs. GISNIC can be used in environment impact analysis, watershed management, maintaining land records, etc.
DISNIC
NICNET based Natural Resources Informatics for Sustainable Development at grass-root level address to the practical and sound plan management approach of District Informatics Development Programme (DISNIC) envisages comprehensive micro-level plan, for a village or cluster of villages, using geo-referenced natural resources-cum-socio-economic-database, at village level resolution. The objective is to prepare Natural Resources Inventory in order to estimate and quantify the present level and trends of utilisation of natural resources to facilitate the cost-benefit analysis with respect to developmental and economic activities within the limits set by carrying capacity of eco-system, in addition of locating the environmental problem areas and estimate their intensities. It also intends to facilitate Natural Resource Thematic Mapping and Development of Resource Atlases for different applications for various levels of decision making in planning process. It will be building computerised spatial/non spatial database of natural resources besides introducing natural resources assessment and utilisation pattern, comfortable with terrain characterisation, in an area or district to optimise production systems. Natural Resources Informatics address to GIS applications in integrated resource based micro-planning in districts, watershed management, wasteland development, agro-ecological planning, land suitability analysis, soil and water conservation, environmental planning, etc.
"There are four key issues involved in implemention of GIS. Standardisation of the formats, infrastructure, legal framework and data. Standardisation of the format is very important", says Dr. B. K. Gairola, Deputy Director, National Informatics Centre while referring to Norway where standardised formats have been evolved for everything. Legal issues are involved regarding the ownership of the data. The IT task force recommends the use of NIC infrastructure for data dissemination but it is for the respective departments to decide which information they want to disseminate. NIC does not own data", Dr. Gairola added. "There are problems with the mindset of the people. Even if data are given, people don’t know how to use them. There is a need to make concerned people understand the importance of the use of spatial data. Higher investment involved and degree of accuracy and details of information are associated problems in promoting the use of GIS", said Dr. Gairola in an exclusive interview with GIS@development.
"The emphasis is shifting from map manipulation to analysis. There has been growing demand for modelling and spatial analytical uses of data for various purposes. However, different sectors have different interest and different way of representing and looking at solution for their problem in the context of modelling", says Dr. Vandana Sharma, Technical Director, NIC. It is, therefore, Dr. Sharma feels that for the applications, which are of prime interest for the growth of the country, there is need to improve accessibility, sharing and use of such geospatial data. Efforts at NIC to this effect is to identify and prioritise these data bases and develop a distributed GIS on NICNET which is acting as backbone of National Information Infrastructure. This basically addresses need for availability of accurate geospatial data with capability to integrate it with different thematic layers. With above objectives, efforts are underway to examine availability of data at the national level and integrate them through GIS platform."
Utility Mapping
Realising the crucial role of utility mapping in the management and utility service systems, NIC established its Utility Mapping Group at its Headquarters in New Delhi in 1989. The group endeavours to map various utilities on large-scale common digital basemaps. It also attempts to create an integrated database of all the utilities along with digital basemaps for their proper management. The Utility Mapping Group has successfully completed several projects. One of the important projects is the Utility Mapping Project for Delhi. The project was conceptualised with various Departments of the Delhi Administration including the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), Delhi Water Supply and Sewerage undertaking, Delhi Fire Service, Delhi Traffic Police, Public Works Department and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd.. "The urban development department plays the role of coordinator, says Dr. Mahesh Chandra, Senior Technical Director, NIC while emphasising that this work is an investment for the future.
The basic problem was the availability of large-scale base maps of the city. So it was decided to establish a large scale (1:1000) map for a pilot area of 30 sq km in Delhi. The Utility Group developed the mapsheet indexing system for various plotting scales. All the basemaps were stored in GINIS/MAPMAN software. Various layers for different utilities were created and superimposed on the basemap layer. The basemap and utility layers could be stored and retrieved. The data related to various utilities such as water, sewer and fire were collected from old records, plans and maps. The utility lines and the objects which were underground and exposed were again field checked for their positional accuracy and Metrotech detectors and Ferromagnetic line tracers. The measurements so obtained were then incorporated again in the respective utility layers by using GINIS package. The Utility Group has been involved in Computerisation of Pre-paid Taxi service for Delhi Traffic Police, Railway Route Alignment of Udhampur-Katra section, and Development of GINIS VISION software package for structuring and manipulating cartographic data. Several other projects are also in pipeline. A digital basemap for Okhla Extension of Delhi, covering an area of 180 sq km is under production. In an other application of GIS, an integrated database of all the addresses in Delhi is being created in Oracle to enable emergency services to be at the scene of crime or incident without losing any time. The exact physical locations of these addresses will be identified against the basemap as the background. This will enable police personnel to be directed to a particular address from a central control point. This solution will be available on both Pentium PC and Mainframe platforms. Utility Mapping Group has already conducted the feasibility studies for Utility Mapping System for the Chandigarh Electricity Department and Tamil Nadu Electricity Board and for the preparation of Digital Basemaps for the State of Sikkim. The Group also provides training to the personnel from various organisations on the GIS software developed by NIC.
Elaborating the role of NIC in information documentation and dissemination, Dr. Mahesh Chandra says that NIC provides the mechanism for data collection and its dissemination, however, data are owned by various departments and ministries. "The culture of government offices is changing from close door policy to open door policy. One should not expect results overnight as this transition will take its own time. It is wrong to say that data are not accessible from government departments. Information are provided for specific projects, however, data are not treated as commodity," said Dr. Mahesh Chandra.
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