Digbijoy Bhowmik
Research Associate – Projects
Centre for Spatial Database Management and Solutions
[email protected]
| Any investment into geospatial information is uniquely bound by the space it belongs to. It came as no surprise when Reliance, the largest business house of the country decided to invest a sizeable fortune into creating a spatial information base. |
For a country of 1.2 billion individuals, out of which 28% live in urban areas, the market for consumer services seem vast – and probably needs several service providers to even cover the extent. Only few enterprises have developed the potential or the capability to deliver a holistic range of services over such a large spatial extent. It therefore came as no surprise when Reliance, largest business house of the country decided to invest a sizeable fortune into creating a spatial information base that could play a significant role in the efficiency of its services spread over an intended 693 cities all over the country.
Enterprise GIS of Reliance
It has been long postulated, though less proven that a GIS platform can help manage distribution of services, both at the input as well as the output levels. The task of creating and managing this Enterprise GIS management system was taken up by Relience through its Reliance InfoComm subsidiary whose primary foray is into providing communications solutions – more popularly known as Reliance IndiaMobile.
Over the last two decades, Reliance has invested into almost every consumer and industrial sector. Almost all of these sectors have had their processes of decision making governed by spatial issues and constraints – so it was only natural that the company developed an in-house system of supplying geospatial information that could help all the sectors.
Fig 1 Quality control process of creating GIS-ready maps
