May you elaborate on some of the initiatives of Centre for Spatial Information Technology at JNTU in recent past in the domain of Spatial Sciences.
We have initiated and implemented an M Tech programme in Spatial Information Technology. This course essentially fringes around tools of information and communication technology providing the manpower in the ITES sector. The other course designed and implemented at our Centre is the M Tech in Surveying Technology. With the availability of high resolution remote sensing data supported by surveying tools like GPS and Total station, the large scale mapping is attaining higher significance. As such there is definite need for providing state-of-art trained surveying technologists to the industry. I am proud that we are meeting this requirement. Added to this, the second course includes subjects like geodesy, satellite geodesy, large scale mapping, topographic surveying and cadastral surveying which are not covered in a formal degree program in many academic institutions in our country. As such our initiatives in development of human resources in the area of spatial sciences and technology are in tune with developments in space technology both at national and global level.

In the wake of the growing significance of 'Geospatial Sciences’ and its applications, what role do you see of academicians?
In simple terms the academic institutions provide the human resources which do not meet the requirements of industry. That is why many industries include training component for all the freshers joining their organizations. After undergoing through the training module only they become useful to the organizations. Why so? This is because the course structures are not current and it takes lot of time to implement changes in syllabi in many of the academic programmes. But situation is certainly better in autonomous institutions in the country where the time for implementation of updated course structure and syllabi is relatively less. Here my remarks are pertinent specifically to academic programmes in the area of spatial sciences and technologies. Please note that that the Space Technology is changing the way governance and commerce are conducted and is bound to benefit the everyday lives of citizens. Let it be the natural resources management sector or video conferencing or disaster mitigation or global warming, or national security and surveillance or infrastructure management. Even consider sectors like distance education, access to global news and sports and TV and direct home broadcast. It is the space technology influencing and playing a major role in all these sectors. So taking a cue out of these requirements the academic content should be context based with scope to provide high quality human resources trained in current state of the technologies. Human resource development is vital for sustenance of any high level technological activity. There is need to promote high level value addition to geospatial data. The strategies include promotion of innovation and R&D in the academic institutions and commercialization of R&D and constant dialogue between academicians, government and industry. The last 3-5 years have seen scope for two major changes in the GIS industry that will dramatically affect the way geographic information systems are perceived, used and sold. Spatial data and information systems can no longer seen as niche systems. In fact, they can no longer be seen as separate systems at all but as integral parts of homogenous corporate information systems. While specialist GIS vendors will be the driving force behind spatial technologies, the systems themselves will no longer be a special case. More exactly than being 'quandary', Geospatial Technology are almost attaining the status of 'just another software component' that can be added to a system as simply as an attachment to e mail.

What are your comments on the industry - institution - government interface in terms of careers of GIS experts created through education in India?
A basic question asked by a student before taking a decision is whether this particular degree programme and the specialization helps him to get a good job. Will he have a good career if he joins this particular degree program? My answer is to him is that 'Yes. but the condition is that you should be the top in the class'. That is because the number of jobs for specialists could be few. But in reality this is not the situation. There are jobs at medium level with medium salaries. In India we do not know how to utilize the manpower ranked as 'Above average' ie those between Distinction class and Average class. The economic growth and development in USA is primarily due to the avenues developed for utilization of the 'above average skilled' manpower. They have fully exploited their skills and made them to play a key role in development of their country. In India we miss this link. India is fast moving into being an information and knowledge society especially with the emphasis on Information Technology and "transparent" e-governance. In this context let us copy and imitate the US model in exploiting the potential of the Above average people in development of our country. There is scope to build careers for these 'above average skilled' persons who are in great numbers. They may be available probably, in a raw form. What is missing is an interface. How do you get it? A lot is being said about industry-institution interaction, entrepreneurship development programs in academic institutions. Many of these programs are outdated and lack professionalism. In general the academic bodies teach everything starting from invention of wheel in any UG or PG program. This wastes lot of time leaving little scope for advanced and current technological tools.

The field is the fusion of information technology built on high-powered computing, earth sciences, and communication engineering aimed at revolutionizing the industry, government and academia. Skills that have great value on the current job market are related to image processing, software engineering, mobile communication, mobile mapping, ERP, CRM, digital photogrammetry, sequence analysis, bioinformatics, land information systems, health care, molecular modeling, PERL programming, Web interface design, data mining, communication skills, Internet literacy, integration of heterogeneous and distributed resources and tools, user support, virtual reality systems (esp. for real-time communication), visualization, LINUX, UNIX, database retrieval etc, Take for example case of GIS and IT. The border between GIS and IT is becoming blurred. This will facilitate integration of GIS into mainstream IT. This new development is the growth of Internet mapping.

Where lies the future of geospatial sciences and geospatial market in India?
In a way, India has had a strong foundation of a spatial data infrastructure though mainly analog and paper-map based. Traditionally, the central spatial information infrastructure has been managed as a set of discrete mapping responsibilities within several central agencies. Now Indian NSDI is taking some shape. Of course it has its own limitations with no national perspective.

Technological innovations have helped speed up the acceptance of GIS within the IT world, but they have often caused headaches on the implementation side. The future GIS promoter or developer or vendor will not be classic 'sachet shifters', i.e. they may not have a distinct product to put on the market, but they will offer services. Such services may incorporate anything from vehicle tracking to e-commerce etc. The most puffed up of these new services will be those going under the banner of embedded systems and location-based services (LBS). The Location based services though at infancy at the present moment they will become the spinal column of GIS in the coming 5-8 years. The acceptance of GIS by systems integrators, such as IBM and major software producers such as Oracle and Microsoft will provide good boost to the technology vis a vis the market. With Open standards evolving in both GIS and Wireless technology area the Scope for viable Open standards in Location Based services have become feasible. XML based data interchange has evolved as a clear choice and geographical data through XML has come a long way with GML4.0 standards. Challenges however exists in working together for providing interfaces to the various components and integrating as system where components can be conveniently introduced, modified or removed under an open standards framework.

What do you think are the issues that might be affecting the geospatial science discipline in Indian education?
Integrate earth science, Resources engineering and communication engineering with information technology and what do you get? Geospatial ICT, of course. This emerging field is turning out to be one of the hottest new careers, fueled by major projects now underway that are creating a demand for experts who understand both domain knowledge and computing and can interpret the vast amount of data this type of research generates. Geoinformatics, Hydroinformatics, Mobile communications and mapping, bioinformatics etc are the spin-off boons of space technology, information technology and communication technology. Information science has been applied to specific domains like earth sciences, biology and hydrology to produce the fields called Geoinformatics, Bioinformatics, Hydroinformatics etc.

The telecom and power infrastructure, pharmaceutical, and agricultural product companies are counting on economic benefits from mapping the terrain and its resources on a very large scale. The knowledge discovery will support these developments. With these goals in mind, knowledge management is achieving great significance. The interpretation of satellite imagery, thematic mapping all have great potential for knowledge management applications.