 Prof. Arup Dasgupta Honorary Managing Editor arup.dasgupta@gisdevelopment.net Last month, India concluded a massive exercise of electing representatives to the Lower House of the Parliament. People gave thumbs up to those who were seen as progressive and development-oriented and firmly rejected those who were found mired in ideologies of the past. In doing so, citizens proved that in a democracy, they are both kings and kingmakers. Well, the excitement is over and now is the time for hard work; to live up to citizens' expectations; to provide good governance. Information technology is already in use for providing G2C services. Most of these services have a hidden spatial component but this is not explicit. For example, a property tax receipt refers to a property holding but not its spatial context. GIS can provide the spatial context and we are seeing the convergence of IT and GIS for providing citizen based services. At the lowest end is the land record service, which provides a land title record on payment of a modest sum. However, as this edition showcases, much more is possible. Property taxes can be indexed to its location; a prime location can attract higher tax rates. Insurance premia can be decided on the degree of hazard at the location. While this type of G2C services are growing, an interesting area opening up is the C2G services made possible by easy Internet access and tools like Web 2.0, ubiquitous computing and crowd sourcing, introducing the concept of Gov 2.0. Recently, one of our editorial staff did a search with 'GIS+governance' and the results were interesting. Among the hits, several were related to public participation in planning. In an experiment in Stockholm, children were encouraged to add their places of interest in a map. This information was found to be a useful tool for spatial planning in the urban context. Another reference is related to public participation in mapping of traditional holdings. This was with an idea of empowering and enabling them to participate in the planning process. In fact, one of the stated claims of ubiquitous mapping is to provide systems, which can make such participation easy. Governance requires much more than just maps. It requires spatial information and information on ownership, taxes, regulations, rights and other non-spatial information to be used together seamlessly. GIS thus needs to be placed at the core of e-governance and the total system needs to work as a single entity. Standardisation and interoperability are key issues for this to happen. Interdepartmental barriers need to come down. In urban planning, this is happening with the integration of GIS and CAD. The integrated system allows engineers, architects and planners to sit together with a common dataset to look at how cities can grow keeping in mind citizens' requirements. In the regional and rural context, GIS and IT are being brought together to bring spatially oriented services to the doorstep of the farmer. In this edition, we look at many of these developments and explore the opportunities, threats and solutions for the geospatial world. |