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Can Elephants Dance?

Ravi Gupta
Centre for Spatial Database Management and Solutions (CSDMS)
G-4, Sector 39, NOIDA 201 301 India
Email: Ravi.Gupta@csdms.org
Web: www.csdms.org


Introduction
National Mapping Organisations (NMOs), which played a crucial role, once upon a time in creating accurate and reliable spatial databases in many developing countries are slowly becoming victims of their own success. They are unable to come out of the old-age control mindset and allow equitable access to spatial data to other government and non-government agencies.

The GIS scenario in India is very complex and fairly difficult to understand. On the supply side there is government, which is making huge investments in remote sensing satellite programme. There are many large national mapping agencies in surveying, geology, forestry, agriculture, water etc., which work independently of each other, with little coordination among themselves. The client of all these government efforts is various government user organisations themselves, at central, state and local levels. Unfortunately, in spite of huge geographic information generating infrastructure, the availability and usage of geographic information within the government itself at all levels is very very low.

In the age of reforms, when private and the NGO sector are playing crucial role in the developmental planning and implementation, this dogmatic approach of the NMOs has led to anxiety, anguish and despair among the spatial data users. Forced to look for options, they are now relying more and more on the private sector for fulfilment of their spatial data needs.

NMOs are sometimes termed as Elephants (many a times white ones) to point out their massive size, the huge funds needed to maintain them and their having more of an exhibitory role than a utilitarian role in day-to-day life of the citizens, in many developing countries, if not elsewhere.

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.

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.