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Introduction
Spatial (geographic) information is becoming vital day by day in making sound decisions at the local, regional, state or national level planning, in infrastructure development, disaster management, natural resource management, business development, implementation of action plans etc. and many more fields incorporating the spatial data in their analysis. Geographic Information System (GIS) has emerged as a great technology dealing with spatial data. The advancement in computer hardware and software technology with lowering costs and availability of more and more hard disks space and memory available to the users at a very nominal cost has led to the increased production of the spatial information and making it digitally available and compatible with other databases. It has further tempted the organizations to generate their own spatial databases to satisfy their often very specific needs.

This effort of organizations however leads to duplication of efforts. The cost of creating and maintaining digital data is high therefore, it is important for organizations to share the data and technology with each other and avoid duplication and at the same time ensure the full utilization of data. The spatial data in most of the countries is controlled by government sector, therefore the federal laws concerning data sharing and interagency cooperation are most important. Further, the organizations concerned need to be made available with required funds. The data sharing can be viewed in terms of organizational and technological data sharing. The organization data sharing is seen as the free use of another entity's data sets, in manual or automated form. As in " we are happy to let you have access to and use the data created in our agency".

The technological data sharing is the capability to have one agency's data used by another entity's automated system. As in " our system is capable of reading and manipulating data from any other system in any other format". The present day need for a shared spatial database policy is well established and justified. Certainly, there are hurdles in developing a nationwide policy and system to follow a shared database policy. The situation becomes more complicated and difficult in a geographical and political scenario that existed in a big country like India. But with the growing realization of the benefits of the shared database policy authorities and organizations in India have started paying more and more attention in this direction. Formation of National Spatial Database Infrastructure (NSDI) for the country is an effort in this direction.

There are very few countries in the world actively working on this direction owing to their own limitations. There is certainly one country named Qatar, which has set an exemplary nationwide GIS in the country. Qatar is the first country in the world to adopt a nationwide GIS policy which has become a working model for many enterprise GIS in the world. Indian effort towards developing NSDI can get some direction from the methodology that Qatar Nationwide GIS followed and lessons learned from its successful implementation. Of course, there is no match between India and Qatar in terms of geographic extension and diversity, population size, prevailing socio-economic conditions and political scenario, yet, the steps involved and methodology to be followed could be identical to a significant level.

Before evaluating and seeing Qatar GIS development in the Indian context it would be appropriate to discuss briefly about the Qatar nationwide GIS, its development, present status and future prospects. The experience gained from Qatar nationwide GIS and lessons learned can be put forth for further discussions besides submitting certain recommendations towards adopting a nationwide Shared spatial data and GIS policy in India.