Business GIS in India in the Light of New Map Policy Dr Pramod K Singh Assistant Professor Institute of Rural Management, Anand, India Email: pramod@irma.ac.in, GIS has an important role to play in a variety of decision-making systems in specific functional areas of management. There have been widespread uses of GIS in marketing, banking, insurance and strategic planning especially in developed countries. India also witnesses such applications, which is yet to gain momentum. This paper discusses future of business GIS in India in the light of National Map Policy. India has a very long tradition of systematically collecting spatial data through various organizations at national and state levels, creating a broad and powerful installed base. However, the institutional aspects of the same installed base create lock-in effects. These institutions have historically acted in a compartmentalized manner with limited sharing of data or applications not only for citizens and the private sector, but also for other government agencies. This reflects a poor appreciation of information dissemination by these organizations. National Map Policy (NMP) of India is now available online at the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India website for public access (http://dst.gov.in/doc/NationalMapPolicy.doc). It envisages two series of maps: the Defense Series Maps (DSMs) and the Open Series Maps (OSMs). The DSMs will cater for defense and national security requirements while OSMs will cater for civilian requirements and will become unrestricted after obtaining a one-time clearance from the Ministry of Defense. But who will take this clearance? OSMs of scales larger than 1:1 million either in analogue or digital formats can be disseminated by Survey of India (SOI) by sale or through an agreement to any agency for specific end use. The users can make value addition to these maps and can share the information under initiations to the SOI. The information of all such sharing will also require to be logged in the Map Transaction Registry. NMP mentions that SOI will ensure no civil and military vulnerable areas and vulnerable points are shown on OSMs. After all what are these vulnerable areas? Permission to publish maps both in paper and digital as well as over the web has also been granted to users in the policy. NMP also grants users to add value to the maps and even prepare their own value-added maps, after entering into an agreement with the SOI. Why agreements with SOI and what will be the nature of such agreement? Besides SOI, other major stakeholders of spatial data are Department of Space, union and state agencies dealing with spatial information, private sectors and academic institutions. The NMP does not specify the role of other stakeholders explicitly. Again, the policy does not mention procedure to access the OSMs by these stakeholders. If it is going to be a tedious bureaucratic process of OSMs acquisition by these institutions, the very purpose of NMP will be defeated. One of the objectives of the NMP is ‘to promote the use of geospatial knowledge and intelligence through partnerships and other mechanisms by all sections of the society’. However the policy is silent about partnership process with the major stakeholders dealing with spatial information. NMP puts SOI on the driver’s seat and role of other stakeholders are by and large left out. The NMP along with legislation on right to information in India is a paradigm shift towards openness and access to information. However, these are not going to pay much dividend in terms of sharing of spatial information amongst all the major stakeholders unless there is change in the very culture of sharing with each stakeholder. A more comprehensive ‘National Spatial Policy’ covering all important sources of spatial information along with a vibrant National Spatial Data Infrastructure is need of the hour. If these issues are addressed and business enterprises are dedicated to use GIS in their work flow, business GIS can grow leaps and bounds in India. Successful implementation of GIS in business requires that the GIS be used in a substantive way at enterprise-wide in their day to day work. Hence successful implementation of GIS in an organization depends not only on easy availability of spatial information but also the willingness and motivation of its senior managers.