Right to Information
Since beginning of our journey for crusading for wider use of GIS technology in India, our focus has been on certain issues.
Issues like Right to Information (November-December 1997), National Policy on Data Dissemination (September-October, 1998) and various other relevant columns like data, policy, census, governance, etc which have direct or indirect overtones of difficulty regarding procurement of maps in the region. We set out for this journey because of we realised the continued shortfall of maps in South Asian region. Maps - the lifeline of GIS.
There have been milestones in this journey. Readers may kindly recall our issue on Digital Map Policy of India (November-December, 1998). The impact of the issue can be seen in letters to the editor (January-February, 1999) where Mr. N. Vittal, Central Vigilance Commissioner, Government of India sought clarification on the issue from Dr. N. Sheshagiri, Special Secretary, Planning Commission & Director General, National Informatics Centre, Government of India and Dr. Sheshagiri has endorsed the viewpoint of GIS@development. Another milestone was March-April 1999 when GIS@development started a section "Unshackle the Maps" with a mission. A mission to make the life of GIS user in the region a bit easier. The section featured a landmark article of Mr. S. V. Srikantia, "Restriction on Maps in India - An Anachronism that needs removal". In the following issue, May-June, 1999 we provided the information on where and how to get the restricted topographical maps of India from UK and USA. Our previous issue (July-August, 1999) was entirely devoted on the map and data policy of India.
Our esteemed readers may recall that in our previous issue we have published an article
"Restrictions on Survey of India Maps: Logic and Rationale" by S. M. Mathur. We have received a response from Survey of India. We contacted S. M. Mathur to comment on the points raised. Also, we contacted Sanjib Ghosh, USA for his observations on Survey of India’s remark. We have also received a letter from Brigadier A.S. Iyer, Former Director, Survey of India on S. M. Mathur’s article. These letters throw light on many grey areas in technical and policy aspects. Let’s have a look on them.