GeoIntelligence 2022 was held in New Delhi on June 14 and 15 after a hiatus of four years. With the theme ‘Geospatial Strategy for Defense and Security’, the conference focused on defense, internal security and public safety, and space applications of geospatial technology, bringing together the who’s who of the defense and intelligence community and industry leaders in geospatial technology.
The first plenary session was moderated by Lt. Gen. Girish Kumar, VSM (Retd.), Advisor, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India —also the lead speaker — eponymous to the theme. He began by stressing the importance that geospatial technology plays in the ongoing ‘digital age’ and how it is now a widely acknowledged fact.
“We need to have a geospatial strategy for the country. The Government of India has taken various [forward looking] steps in announcing a space strategy; similarly, a comprehensive geospatial strategy and policy is required,” Kumar said, adding that while guidelines do exist, there needs to be a separate document for defense and security.
“Positional and navigational infrastructure has to be the foremost element in the strategy. In this regard, the country has already undertaken steps in the form establishing a Continuous Operating Reference Station (CORS) network,” he said.
Kumar added that all datasets need to be integrated with precise geospatial foundation datasets and the neglected aspect of investment needs to be addressed for the formation of a robust data model structure. “Our [India’s] reliance on foreign agencies in defense and intelligence should be minimum,” he said, lauding the adoption of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) for geospatial survey in the country, and concluded by talking about the need for interoperable datasets, inclusion of all stakeholders, as well as the need for capacity building.
The plenum was then addressed by Pronab Mohanty, IPS, Inspector General, Border Security Force (BSF), who spoke on the impact of core geospatial technology, specifically Geographic Information System (GIS), in that oldest of defense and internal security job — guarding borders.
“We need to take a fresh look at GIS. At any given point of time, petabytes of data must be generated from GIS,” said Mohanty, emphasizing on how it is changing lives and has spawned an enormous number of applications in the past few decades. “One of the aspects of GIS or geospatial datasets is that they’re different from conventional databases. So far, in computer science, data used to be stored in two-dimensional tensors; when you look at GIS, there are three dimensions — possibly a fourth in the form of time,” he said, highlighting the specialty of being able to store data in matrices.
Mohanty went on to elaborate how beneficial this has proved to be for mapping and its ramifications for military and paramilitary planning, from determining logistics to leveraging operational potential with regard to physical geography. “When we talk about GIS, we need to understand the art of cartography and how fast and far it has evolved in recent times,” he added, noting how the emergence of 3D mapping has resulted in the formation of a common operating picture.
The Inspector General of BSF then listed major applications born out of the rapid evolution of geospatial and allied technologies before speaking on the importance of GeoIntelligence as a discipline. The session’s final speaker was Vishal Anand, Senior Vice President — Sales, Esri India. Besides talking about Esri’s cornerstone role in the propagation of the adoption of geospatial technology in India, he said, “Everybody has talked about data because it has become real time. Visualization expectation is also in real time.”
The availability of data in real time has indeed changed the game and acted as a catalyst for the development of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that is changing the way people work and lead their lives, besides shaping a new world order in which defense and security play such a critical part. As far the influence of geospatial technology goes in bringing about this change, Anand rightly pointed out: “Data not analyzed in the right form is not valuable.” This is a marker of how the rubric of defense and security is indeed geospatial.
© Geospatial Media and Communications. All Rights Reserved.
