South Asia co-operation in GIS technologies - Some thoughts
What
should South Asia do
Realising that we all
share common environmental problems and that data/information/decision making
are fundamental requirement for any development process, the South Asia
countries should speed up adopting GIS in their day-to-day problems Though
chronologically GIS was born later to Remote Sensing, it is to be realised that
in some countries in Europe and in the Gulf, GIS is used more than Remote
Sensing. In South Asia, though intellectually high, and time is passing by, the
adoption rate is not enough.
Data source is the first step in any GIS. Aerial data,
stereo pairs and updated maps are difficult to procure in many countries. Open
data policy and easy access to data are fundamental requirements to use GIS.
Furthermore, the Remote Sensing data is mostly formatted for easy application of
Digital Image Processing. For GIS applications vector format, Geo TIFF format
(platform independent in UNIX) etc. are needed so as to add/modify attribute
information easily.
It is
essential to build up national capacity in the field of GIS/Geoinformatics to
increase efficiency in the planning process. However, there is realisation that
the environmental and national resource management issues have gone beyond the
national boundaries. The global/regional climate, biogeochemical cycle,water
resources and tropical forests which are major sources of primary productivity
are considered key issues requiring immediate need of regional co-operation in
Asia Pacific. For example, the snow fall in the Hindukush region affects the
monsoon influencing the agricultural productivity of slopes of Himalaya and
flood plains of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Deforestation or increasing
human interventions in Himalayas have led to increased run off, decreased
productivity at slopes and have contributed to sediment discharge in rivers
resulting into floods in plains. Tropical evergreen forests of Asia are major
sink of carbon. These forests are reported to have experiencing fastest rate of
deforestation. The oceans, which are major carbon sink, are economically
interwoven as socio-economic fabric, are being polluted and over-exploited. In
this back drop, it is essential that a consensus be arrived at on data sharing,
data standardisation and effective monitoring and management of these
environmental processing. It is felt that this can only be achieved through
active participation of certain regional institutions like, CSSTE-AP, ICIMOD,
IIMI, AIT, CIFOR, IRRI etc. These institutions can contribute on capacity
building, promote research on regional issues and act as a network for
catalysing data sharing mechanisms of the data producers and data utilisers. For
GIS to pick up what is urgent is easy access to data for many users. The biggest
bottleneck in implementing any GIS is data input. It is a time consuming,
extremely costly and labour intensive process. It may or may not be successful.
The constraints in the availability of aerial data due to costs and sensitivity,
updated maps in digital form and other social data has only compounded matters.
However, things are beginning to change. High resolution satellite data is soon
poised to become a reliable source of GIS input data. (IRS-1C/1D PAN and IRS-P5
PAN of 2.5 m resolution, SPOT data). We would like to see GIS systems in each
user organisation (sector) wherein the data is inputted from many sources
continuously, information is tapped out by many users and is a busy system, with
regular operations for various applications. Regular training programs should be
organised in each application to different target groups using Multimedia
lessons and using Internet. Techniques such as Data fusion, intelligent GIS
should form a part of the syllabus. Non-Governmental organisations like CSDMS
could help enhance the process and prepare the application scientists and
decision makers to a new value system.
One suggestion to all specialists in the SA region. Whenever
an application study is done, please also generate the final classified output
in a GIS compatible form so that it can feed directly into tomorrow=92s GIS.
Another suggestion is that those who are involved in networks (any network with
geographic attributes) are candidates for GIS; marketing and service oriented
companies, power and telecommunications companies, fertiliser and seed
companies, real estate, housing and housing finance companies etc. These can and
should be targetted by GIS companies.