The National Geospatial policy is very progressive and transformational. What makes it unique is that it sets several measurable goals which define a roadmap to build foundation data sets and create an environment to significantly enhance geospatial adoption. Private sector has to be an active participant in this journey and collaborate with the government to grow GIS proliferation in our country.
The Policy clearly highlights the Government’s intent to make India a World Leader in Global Geospatial space with the best in class ecosystem for innovation. However, the onus lies on market leaders like us to enable the government to make this dream a reality. The private sector has to be an active participant in this journey and collaborate with the government to grow GIS proliferation in our country.
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In my view some of the initiatives that the Indian geospatial industry needs to focus on are:
- Capacity building, with a special focus on the user community to demystify ‘geospatial’ and work towards making it a mainstream IT manifestation. Also focus on technical manpower, especially at the middle and top of the skill pyramid, namely Solution Architects, System Analysts, DB Analysts, et al. Also Program Managers and Project Managers. This will help in bridging the workforce gap, thereby leading to an increased usage of geospatial technologies across sectors.
- Create unique deployment models around Web/Cloud to enable businesses to integrate location information into their existing workflows with minimal technical intervention. This seeding process would eventually lead to GIS-centric workflows in several verticals.
- Creation of configurable solution templates in order to enhance ease of GIS implementation. This is one of the challenges that often deters some of the potential users from GIS adoption.
- Solution as a Service on the Cloud would be an effective deployment model to serve customised GIS-enabled solutions to standardised workflows. The users would be both government and private sector organisations.
- Start-ups will play a major role in expanding the user base by developing applications consuming open APIs on geo portals hosting data. As industry leaders, we must support the Start-up ecosystem by way of mentorship, technology support, market access, creating strategic vision and business plans, et al. My message to the geospatial industry leaders is “Each One Mentor One”.
- In the past decade our government has built, under Digital India and NeGP programs, several truly world class enterprise platforms like UPI, UIDAI, GSTN, COWIN, et al, collectively called India Stack. There is a need to build a similar (horizontal) platform which I would like to call India Geospatial Stack, to serve various government and private sector programs. National GIS had the vision to do something similar. Perhaps there is a need to reimagine NGIS with a new vision and deployment strategy.
- Integration of GIS with advancements in IT like AI/ML/DL, IOT, Big Data Analytics, Web/Cloud, AR/VR, 3D, Digital Twins and Metaverse has the potential to further enhance integration of geospatial with IT and create unique opportunities in several underdeveloped verticals.
- We also need to bring geospatial into the IT vision and strategy of corporate CIOs who, barring some exceptions, are still shying away from enterprise level adoption of GIS. In many cases it is still being deployed as a point solution. Access to high quality geospatial data hosted on geo-platforms being developed by various data creators together with availability of solution templates on the Cloud will stimulate GIS adoption in the commercial segment.
- Data discovery is a challenge that several existing and potential users face while trying to determine from where they can source the data required for their project. DST has taken an excellent initiative to develop National Geospatial Data Registry which aims to be the single source for meta data. All data creators, both private sector and government, must publish meta data about the geospatial information products available with them.
- Growth of the Drone ecosystem is yet another driver for GIS adoption in several verticals, especially in Infrastructure, Urban, Real Estate, Land Records, Utilities, et al. Drone policy announced last year has significantly liberalized the approval process for drone flying.
The headroom for growth in geospatial adoption in India is high and as industry leaders, we need to shoulder the responsibility to work on the drivers that will enable the users – existing and new – to increase usage.
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The above-mentioned points are just a few of the steps that the private players must focus on to help the country bridge the geospatial digital divide and capitalize on the opportunities arising out of continually evolving geospatial technologies. This is necessary for enabling the government to achieve the growth it aspires to achieve for the Indian economy.
(Rajesh C Mathur is Advisor, ESRI India Technologies Ltd)
Disclaimer: Views Expressed are Author's Own. Geospatial World May or May Not Endorse it
