Skip to main content

A grand GIS project!

          India is mapping out its newest national asset, a state-of-the art online information bank, which promises to transform governance, aid planning and make life easier for the man on the street. Called National GIS, this geographical information system powered service would be the first one-stop database of India's natural and physical assets, providing information and services about government schemes and businesses -- right from locating malls, hospitals or ATMs to lodging complaints.

          The locational data service, expected to be fully operational in 3 years, would be accorded the status of a national asset and can accessed through desktops or mobiles. National GIS, which is expected to help boost productivity and keep a check on wasteful expenditure, will have a "citizen layer" that will make it possible for individuals to geographically tag complaints and grievances on a real-time basis that will be accessible to users across three levels-—government, businesses and citizens.

          It will also link individuals with UID numbers to their geographical location. The project is the brainchild of the Planning Commission, which has set up a 12-member core group to work out the organizational structure, technological base, costs and user interface of the database. In order to make GIS database a national asset, a proper administrative setup is required.

          Although GIS services are being provided both by the government and the private sector, they are not standardized or even accurate. It is the first time the government is dealing with the standardization of GIS, which has been available in the US since the 1980s. If assets would be standardized, governance would become easy.

          The committee's role is to lay the standards for GIS, such as the accuracy of the road network; stopping PDS pilferage by ensuring vehicles actually deliver to fair price shops; property taxes can be accurately collected since people tend to under-report; consumer indexing of electrical utilities to overlay the user and the power network on the digital map; health and education system rollout, besides others.

          In its initial draft, the core group has envisioned a digital map with geo-tagged spatial data--containing 36 broad categories--that can currently be sourced from various government and private databases. The government already has a sizeable resource of multi-resolution satellite images and topographical and thematic maps. There are also GIS initiatives of the Natural Resources Management System, National Spatial Data Infrastructure and National Urban Information Systems.

          However, none of these are integrated with each other, making it impossible for one government agency to use information of another while alienating private stakeholders altogether. The GIS map will source data from the Planning Commission, census, infrastructure and sectoral datasets of ministries and states and integrate it in one national frame. For the process of integration, the core group has suggested establishing an Indian National GIS Organisation (INGO) that will be the main agency implementing the programme. The first organisation to benefit from such an exercise will be the Planning Commission, which will get a "Plan GIS" in a year if the proposal is cleared by the government.

 Source: Economic Times
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comments here...

Recommended for You

Where does Google get it's live traffic data from?

Referring to a post that I wrote earlier, Google’s - Live traffic Layer , ever wondered how Google collected this data? I was wondering the other day, how Google received live data to display it on their maps as a layer! I looked up the web and found something very interesting and am sharing the same with you all. As we all know, the traffic layer is available most accurately in several states in USA. Most major metro areas in the US have sensors embedded in their highways. These sensors track real time traffic data. Easy to miss at high speeds (hopefully anyway, traffic permitting), more commonly noticed may be the similar sensors that often exist at many busy intersections that help the traffic lights most efficiently let the most amount of people through. The information from these tracking sensors is reported back to the Department of Transportation (DOT). The DOT uses this data to update some of the digital signs that report traffic conditions in many metro areas. They als...
17 comments
Read more

Jquery Mobile Listview enhancements and customization

    In this post today, we will take a look at the various enhancements and customization that we can do to the standard listviews. All these enhancements or customization are questions asked by various people on the Jquery Mobile forum. I have tried to put together a solution to some of them.     Let's take a look at a few of them. Some questions are really amazing like " W hen i have 3 nested listview structure and moved to 3rd nested, how to move back to second nested listview? " Now this is a really good question and a nice valid requirement too. When we had see an example on nested listviews  you must have wondered how we would navigate to the previous levels from the current level. Well here is a solution that I had put together.     Another really nice question was " Listview with collapsable listview inside ". This is really a good example to try out. Take a look at the solution that was proposed and also taken from other jsfid...
Post a Comment
Read more

SASS: Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets - An Introduction

    I had some free time today, and decided to explore into SASS, which I had planned on doing for a long time. SASS is really cool and it really is simple styling with a lot of attitude. SASS really makes CSS so much fun. I loved it and am putting up a few posts to talk about the various features of SASS.     SASS is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance and much more. The SASS CSS is required to be compiled before it is transformed into standard CSS using a command line tool or a web-framework plugin. Let's not worry about this for now.     SASS CSS can be written using 2 types of syntaxes. The most popularly used syntax is known as "SCSS", rightly named " Sassy CSS" and is a superset of CSS3's syntax. This means that every CSS3 stylesheet is valid SCSS as well. The second syntax is an older one known as the "indented syntax" or just SASS. This syntax is for people who do not love brackets and...
Post a Comment
Read more

Multiple markers...

            It rarely happens that there is just one point of interest or just one location that you would like to mark! Generally there is a bunch of markers that appear on the map! Specifically, you want a list of latitude and longitude pairs representing the points of the markers you'll plot.             To store the list of points, you can combine the power of Javascript's array and object constructs. An array stores a list of numbered entities. To access the elements of the array, you must use their numeric indices. So array[0] will point to the first element in the array while array[n] will point to the nth element in the array.             I will use the following piece of Javascript code to demonstrate how multiple markers can be made to appear on a map using the array structure and the for loop for iteration....
1 comment
Read more

Two maps on the same page - Side-by-side

    How good I am feeling to post a code example after such a long time! It's been all "news" over the past so many posts! Well now that I am finally doing a code example, I am posting a very highly requested code sample. Placing two Google Maps on the same page (Now that's simple you would say!), but side by side. Now this is the thing that most people struggle with. Well, implementing the second part is also very simple, as you will see in today's code.     Let's see the code. Here it is!     The output of the above code will be as seen in the result section above.     As most of you will realize, there are two maps, one centered at "Pune" and other at "Noida". Why I chose these two locations? Well, just like that!...The main issue of concern is how the maps appeared side-by-side and not one below the other as would be normal behavior of two "div" elements used in the same page. Now here is the trick! Check out the...
10 comments
Read more