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Can Elephants Dance?
Local Governance Needs: A case in point
Traditionally the national mapping agencies are controlled by national governments. This might be
one of the reasons that they tend to work more closely with the central governments than with the state
and the local governments. Many a times the needs of local governments remain unattended by the
national mapping organisations for years and sometimes for decades. For example the Survey of India
produces maps at 1:250000, 1:100000, 1:50000 and 1:25000. But the needs of local government in
urban and rural areas both is at least 1:1000, if not more. Around 600 mid-sized towns in India are in a
crying need of large-scale maps, but there is hardly any NMO, which is listening.
In the age of sweeping economic changes globally, when private and the NGO sector are playing
crucial role in the developmental planning and implementation, the local governments are faced with
newer choices in management, technologies and financing.
The e-governance is bringing the much-needed attention to the local governments, which they deserve.
The e-governance initiatives are bringing in the funds, the management and the technical infrastructure
to carry out their jobs more efficiently. This is leading to local-government specific GIS solutions
being developed by various government, NGO and private organisations.
This trend is good in the sense that the local governments are now becoming spatially enabled to
tackle the e-governance needs in their respective zones. There is a need to prepare a blueprint for geo-enabling
of the local organisations at the earliest, so that the spatial databases being developed by the
local governments remain compatible with each other, are accurate and sharable in the long run. If this
attention is given today, the local governments GIS databases may seamlessly become part of national
spatial data infrastructure and later the global spatial data infrastructure, whenever in place. NMOs,
which have turned Nelson’s eye towards local governments till now, have a big opportunity and
responsibility to play a crucial role in addressing these issues.
Role of private sector in GIS
In a traditionally non-capitalist economy like India, the private sector has been looked upon with
distrust. In these trying times of economic reforms, things have started changing but the traditional
Indian government system is trying it’s best to scuttle it. In India, the private sector is not allowed to
digitise the Survey of India toposheets, not to protect copyrights but due to ‘defense sensitive’ reasons.
It is not yet legal to publish maps online, and thanks to this law many a enterprising dot-coms could
not do so, in spite of best efforts in the direction.
In general, throughout the world, the private sector participation has been envisaged for the growth of
GIS industry. In US, even small vendors get ample opportunity to flourish by getting at low or no
price government data and by claiming their copyright after doing value addition. In Canada, private
sector works in partnership with government in data dissemination. In UK, private sector can access
the data, after paying for it. In India, data are not accessible to private sector and surely not for
commercial purposes.
To illustrate the difference between the opportunities for private sector in India and elsewhere, we take
the case of US. Unlike SOI, the United States Geological Survey (USGS), 1:24,000 scale topographic
maps are the basic scale maps for the USA and are not protected by copyright. They comprise some
57,000 sheets. Projections for integrating and updating them into coherent digital topographic database
do not foresee completion until the early 21st century. It is technically and legally feasible for a low
labour cost developing nation to purchase the maps and digital files at minimal cost, update them from
commercially available remotely-sensed imagery according to market priorities (there would be no
need for them to deal with remote and sparsely populated areas unless it was profitable), and resell the
maps now claiming commercial copyright. In India, such a situation is unimaginable. We have rules
and regulations that discourage market forces.
In spite of this the private sector companies in India employ around 15,000 professionals, if not more,
in GIS activities. This figure is much much higher than the employment in all the NMOs and
government organisations combines working in GIS in India. Their clients are mainly in US, Europe
and ASEAN, Japan and even Africa. Surprisingly, the Indian GIS market is not 'accessible' to these
companies due to various barriers of policy, mindset and lack of trust on the private sector for
handling a 'sensitive' document like maps.
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