 Prof. Arup Dasgupta Honorary Managing Editor [email protected] |
I have a weakness for maps. Whenever I go to a new place, I hunt for maps to know about the places of interest and savour the romance in the names of places. Recently, I took a trip to Jamnagar in Western Gujarat. Jamnagar is a bustling town, growing at a brisk pace, the home to many big industries and to important religious institutions and nature reserves. I found that I could not get a map listing all these points of interest because Jamnagar was on the western coast, and the home to important air force, naval and coastguard stations. Ergo, information about Jamnagar is restricted. This sums up the geospatial dilemma in India.
As this special issue on India shows India has come a long way down the geospatial road, but it still has miles to go. It has a tremendous repository of spatial information but it lacks a mechanism of organised access. It began talking about a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) when its relevance was still being debated in Europe. Yet today we are still talking about it. Meanwhile, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has launched Bhuvan which incidentally, it quite unnecessarily compares to Google Earth. Bhuvan is what NSDI should be and has features not found in Google Earth. In short, we are sitting on a goldmine of data and that is the problem – we continue to sit on it! We need to develop an attitude of extension that will see data and information flowing to and from the beneficiaries. We need to enable more sectors and more actors in the geospatial arena.
Yes, we do have islands of excellence emerging like the DSSDI and the unsung effort of the Bureau of Census. The census data is rich and spatially enabled. The new decennial exercise coming up in 2011 will most certainly take it further. The remote sensing programme pioneered by ISRO is another island providing the country with a variety of datasets much of which remains sub-optimally used. Partly it is the fault of the colonial data policy which withholds data and partly it is because of the dearth of adequately trained personnel. Capacity building is therefore a major task.
To an outsider, the Indian geospatial scene is a patchwork quilt of centres of excellence, opportunities, threats and weaknesses. The intellectual excellence of India is a given, unfortunately so is its bureaucratic cussedness. What finally wins the day for India is the innovative nature of the average Indian. We muddle through or to put it more politely we adapt to situations and circumstances – and move forward. That is both the hope and the promise.
