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Can Elephants Dance?
Role of Civil Society in GIS
For many people it is difficult to understand what role NGOs have to play in the technology-dominated
arena of GIS. It needs to be emphasised here that social factors, and not the technology
factors, have played a pre-dominant role in hindering the development of GIS in many developing
countries.
Issues like lack of access to information, IPR regimes, public-private partnerships, human resource
management issues etc. can make or break a GIS project. NGOs can play and are playing an important
role, directly or indirectly in creating more conducive atmosphere for GIS to operate in.
For example an NGO, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghathan (MKSS), working for improving the quality
of life of construction labourers in the villages of Rajasthan forced the state government to reveal the
monthly wage records of labourers and prove to the public that they were being paid lower than the
minimum wages specified by the government. This small act had a snowball effect which became a
movement demanding the government to introduce a Freedom of Information act enforced in
Rajasthan. This entitles every citizen to have an access to the state government records at no cost. Few
other Indian states like Goa, Madhya Pradesh, New Delhi, Karnataka etc. have followed the path. This
small openness in some state governments (not big, as it is still not the Right to Information) is helping
to increase the data availability in the public domain and is leading to the usage of these data and
information in various information systems including GIS in India.
Similarly an NGO called Centre for Spatial Database Management and Solutions (CSDMS), to which
the author belongs, advocated that there is a need of major reforms in the Survey of India through
various publications, workshops and seminars. Now the Survey of India is working closely with this
NGO to get its act together and reform itself.
In another example, a people led movement Janagraha, in Bangalore is involving the community to
identify its problems spatially on the large map of Bangalore. Maps help the community to relate
themselves to the city much easily than just text base information.
In another example Media Lab Asia in collaboration with CSDMS is developing a bottom up approach
involving the villagers to develop innovative ways to take GIS to rural communities in India.
The NGO sector in India, which is well supported by national and international funding programmes,
is increasingly becoming GIS-savvy and is emerging as an important producer of development
oriented map, atlases and CD-ROMS.
Elephant to Tigers: Is the transition possible?
Keeping in view the large scale technological changes in the last decade, many National Mapping
Organisations transformed themselves from a generator of geographic information to provider of
geographic information. Many NMOs, who didn’t do so in the last decade have a hobson’s choice.
They no longer are generating as much data as their customers would like them to do. They are not
providing whatever they have through any collaborative arrangements with other similar
organisations. Since they did not do the above two, they now lack the vision and the ability to turn
themselves into facilitators of geographic information for the public, since there are others in the
market that are generating and providing data anyway.
Perhaps it is important for NMOs to realise that ‘if you can’t beat them, better join them’. NMOs have
to realise that private sector now does have the capability to do the data generation on it’s own. NMOs
can play a better role in developing data standards, data access protocols, IPRs, data integration etc.
They should look at things which the private sector can’t do or would not like to do at this stage, e.g.
development of a national GPS framework infrastructure in huge country like India, is a mammoth
job. A NMO should come forward and do it.
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