Right Ideas for Wrong Situation

Prof. P. Mishra
Consultant, Land Information Technologies,
J-94, South Extension - I, New Delhi-110049
Tel: 46231065 (morn/eve)

GIS in India can succeed only when physical data is freely available and there is no method available with GIS professional to know where the data is....Land Information Scenario

It was 1981 when I visited Kanpur Development Authority (KDA) to get some trainees for my recently started course on the Human Settlements Analysis at Dehradun. Towards the end of the discussions I asked, rather impolitely - I feel now, as to what are the major difficulties of urban planners. Mr. Mittal who was the Chief Town Planner of KDA then gave the first difficulty as "there are no base-maps". I promptly took out my dairy as has been my habit for long years, and started jotting his point and asked Sir, what is the next?

Please note down, he said the second difficulty is "there are no base maps available to the planners " Well, I told him, I can guess that third difficulty is also "there are no base maps!"

Scenario today
The scenario today regarding the base maps is almost the same - may be slightly better. There are 500 to 600 important towns crying for the base maps. I have in my various writings, discussions and papers, suggested some expedient methods for quick preparation of base maps/documents which should as a good map-substitute with a view tide over the oft related remarks that base maps are not available.

Our own Indian satellite IRS-1C/IRS-1D are having world’s best resolution of 5.8 metres. This situation is existing since 1995. Raghawswamy from NRSA has been advocating use of the satellite imaging for quite some years.

But it appears that these new ideas have not been able to percolate to the person. The result is; there is hardly any operational example, except for P. Uttarwar of DDA where he has used 5.8 resolution. Satellite imagery for detecting major chunks of unauthorised construction in Rohini Project areas. The major bottleneck as perceived by me is that ‘knowledge’ about the technology is there but there are hardly any organisations who can deliver the technology to the users. A small Development Authority finds it difficult to procure imagery what to say of preparation of base map.

Some commercial firms are now looking at the market in India and are preparing the technological tools of aerial photography -> digital oithophoto-> digital output - line map; satellite imagery based base-maps of towns etc. to meet the urgent demand of base maps.

The major difficulty of the ‘delivery’ of the technology, hopefully, is going to be solved shortly by Govt. organisation like NRSA and a few private organisations.

Geographic Information System in Urban/Regional context
It is my considered opinion that GIS in India can succeed only when physical data is freely available. Or to put it in other way the data available with the organisations could be made reachable to a genuine developer of GIS.

Presently there is no simple method available with GIS professional to know as to where the data is available and how to get it. My recent experience gained at Map India ‘98 by CSDMS at Delhi is that almost all GIS authors generated there own set of data. The whole exercise turned out to be equating GIS with Great Inquiry & Search.

My suggestion for improvement of the scenario can be abstracted as follows:

There should be a Newsletter which should report principal activities of ‘physical-data-generating Agencies.

The same Agency should also suggest to the reading as to how the data can be passed on to the users - on cost etc.

The Newsletter should evolve itself to Internet Web Page with arrangement to keep it updated frequently.

Geographic Information User’s Forum
I always miss a Forum (Platform) where common problems of the users of the geographic information, maps, imagery etc. could be discussed. In fact such a Forum could act as a ‘conduit’ between the Ministry of Science & Technology and Government Departments on one hand and the common users at the other. At present, the seminars or special meets are the only occasions when points like Restriction Policy is discussed - rather always!

The ideas and the suggestions about mapping ‘product’ and ‘services’ remain "bottled" up’ and eventually die down in the absence of a Forum as suggested above.