Technology
The show starts now!
Ravi Gupta
The government has given the information technology community a pleasant surprise by gazetting al the 108 recommendations of the IT Task Force constituted by Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). And instead of concentrating on just the software exports, the government has also taken initiatives for faster IT usage in the government and also in providing faster accesses to the public information held by government. This is a news which gives hopes to the growth of GIS in the country. After the implementation of these policies a completely re-energised phase of the Indian GIS development can be foreseen.
The most obvious bottleneck holding the nation back is lack of access to authentic information and the Internet is the cheapest way to cure it. The Internet explosion as envisaged by the Task Force will expose the citizens on the availability of information world-wide, and the data poverty regarding our country. It could also bring home the need for transparency to the government long before the Right to Information Bill makes it through Parliament. Once people are able to see wealth of infromation that other governments give public access to, there will be massive pressure on us to open up.
The GIS community in the country is facing acute problem of access to reliable data for various types of application. Keeping this in mind, this issueonward we are devoting a special section to Data. We would like to grow this column into full-fledged forum where the information about the data availability in the government, private and NGO sector is provided. We invite our readers to join this forum and express views about GIS data. To start with, we are carrying an article on the use of GIS for better planning and management of census operations.
The southern and western parts of the country are becoming the place of action for GIS industry. The proactive governments like Andhra Pradesh, Tamilnadu, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Orissa and Gujarat have taken radical steps and initiatives to create software friendly environmetn. These states are also giving greater attention to infrastructure developemtn resulting in creation of a good climate for growth of GIS activities. The question arises ‘when will the other states wake up to reap the benefits from GIS?’
Many of our readers have informed us that they would like to see more technical papers in the magazine, apart from the industry and policy news. Keeping this in mind, we are giving greater attention to the research papers from this issue.