Location, which was once known only for mapping and navigation, has matured into intelligence and analytics with opportunities for many sectors to bring about far-reaching sustainable growth.
There is a booming demand for deliveries of people, goods and services. And, according to reports, crop production will need to increase between 60 and 100 percent in order to feed those who are hungry today and the additional two billion people who are likely to inhabit the world by 2050. In such a scenario, sustainability is an indispensable part of growth.
Geospatial World’s GeoSmart India 2021 Digital Series serves as a platform to keep the Indian geospatial industry and its larger stakeholders engaged and connected. The third part of the series on Location and Business Intelligence hosted industry leaders from a wide spectrum of businesses in the country.
With location data and business intelligence, one can seek answers to know “where” things are, “what” the foot traffic trends are, “why” the traffic is less or more, “what” is the prediction of a desired location, and more. Location Intelligence connects the physical world to digital data and provides users with an edge. In the present scenario, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in slowdown and shutdown of businesses impacting various sectors of the economy. However, it has also created growth opportunities for businesses such as e-commerce, shared economy businesses, agriculture, and others.
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The event was moderated by Supriya Nayak, Senior Research Analyst, Geospatial World, and was divided into three sessions. The first session, titled ‘Location and Frontier Technologies for Vaccine Distribution in India’ explored sensor-based logistics for safe and secure vaccine delivery, route-optimization, live monitoring and tracking, digital solution for last mile vaccine distribution, cold-storages and temperature controlled environment.
Mukul Pateria, AI Solution Engineer, IBM, gave the opening talk on ‘Significance of Location Data on Business Processes’. He talked about how knowledge of real-time data was helpful to supply chain/logistics, transport, etc. He also provided the use case of power line and vegetation management in the energy and utilities industry.
“In India, everyone knows data is a problem. NIC provides solutions to many including ICMR,” said Dr. Udaya Kumar, Deputy Director General, National Information Centre (NIC), who detailed on how NIC was supporting agencies in India engaged in COVID-19 management and relief work by providing data on infrastructure, logistics, quarantine, etc.
Emphasizing on the hyperlocal challenge in city planning, Aisik Paul, CTO, DataSutram said, “Planning should not be built on accessibility but mobility. We have to ensure that Location Intelligence is enshrined in city planning.”
The final speaker for the first session was Ajit Kumar, CEO and Co-founder, RealMeds, who talked about key problems in vaccine distribution (wastage and presence of counterfeiting). Speaking about the solutions that his company had to offer, Kumar said, “Our devices can go inside different kinds of packages and provide real-time location and condition of medicines.”
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Liberalization of map-based services by the Indian government, need for resilient Position, Navigation & Timing (PNT) infrastructure, and geocoding for timely and efficient deliveries of people, goods and services formed the theme for the second session which began with a presentation by Amarsh Chaturvedi, Director and Co-founder, Transerve who said, “Data driven decision making is not in a silo anymore. Location Intelligence is stated to play a major role in directly augmenting the business outcomes and helping the businesses leverage location datasets and the intelligence for their core business operations.”
“The importance of location intelligence in this space relies on how hyperlocal the business is. Most businesses that are running on the shared economy model, will rely on location data and analytics,” said Shriya Karanam, Product Marketing, Locale.ai. She added that data collected by businesses driving the shared economy was set to reach half a billion data points.
Devdatta Tengshe, Solutions Architect – GIS, GeoSpoc spoke about geocoding being the hidden key to the challenge in making sense of data to drive better decisions and how there was no single solution to the issues in geocoding in India.
Akshaj Saini, Manager – Corporate Strategy & Analytics, AWFIS Space Solutions talked about how the Indian commercial real estate office stock, which is approximately 960 million square feet, epitomized the iceberg phenomena — a situation where a large percentage of a problem is subclinical, unreported, or otherwise hidden from view.
Deepak Pareek, CEO, Agriwatch moderated the final session that was titled ‘Location-Aware agricultural tools and practices’, which looked at the Farmer Bill 2020 and how it was a gateway for Indian farmers to sell their produce directly to the market; talked about eradicating multi-layered distribution channels; enhancing food security through location intelligence; providing precision data to farmers by using location intelligence, and using LI+AI+ML+IoT for connected farms in India.
The Industry Keynote was given by Vijay Kumar, Senior Vice President-Technical, ESRI India. He said, “Today, GIS maps are not just maps, you can monitor various large programs using dashboards and KPIs.”
Partha Ghosh, Presales Director, India and South Asia, Planet, on how his company’s data can help in sustainable agriculture talked about the company’s latest offerings: “We are very happy to introduce our eight band imagery. More spectral bands means more analytical capabilities.”
Balaya Moharana, Head of Technology, DeHaat talked about how DeHaat was using datasets from such sources as Planet and applying ML and AI, working on the ground with 550,000 farmers.
Finally, there was discussion on technology megatrends that are shaping the future of food and agriculture sector. Each session culminated with questions posed to the speakers on the best practices and insights going forward.
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