Better Maps To Find Treasures

Context: Analysing the potential of new guidelines released by the Department of Science and Technology for regulation of remote sensing, Geographic Information System (GIS), and other geospatial technologies.

Issues in the Indian GIS policy regime

• Lack of a singular, comprehensive national policy: Governed under six departments, India has 17 national policies, some having restrictive and redundant provisions overridden with security concerns.
• Global position: India ranks 25th in Countries Geospatial Readiness Index (CGRI) 2019.

Potential of new geospatial guidelines

• Ease of operation: Make it easier for individuals, companies, organisations, and government agencies to collect, generate, process and use geospatial data and maps within India without the requirement of any prior approval or security clearance.
• Liberalised mapping industry: Democratised access to, and use of, existing datasets owned by government agencies for private firms as well.
• Reduces India’s reliance on foreign resources: For mapping technologies and services.
• Spur domestic innovation across sectors
• Enable efficient and targeted use of scarce resources: Layering various datasets on a high-res GIS database helps optimising resource allocation.
  • E.g. Optimising Covid vaccine availability and demand, determining places with severe lack of bank branches and cash-out points relative to direct benefit transfers.
• Enable efficient design and delivery of services: Situations like the prevalence of hepatitis in certain city pockets and possible correlation to sewerage lines malfunctioning.
  • Nigeria’s Geo-Referenced Infrastructure & Demographic Data for Development (GRID3) project: Enable Covid vaccination teams to ensure no settlements are left out.
• Catalytic intervention to capture property rights: Detailed city-level map recording all properties can be created in an incremental and crowdsourced manner.
  • Low hanging fruits: Amendments to Registration Act, 1908 can mandate mandatory attachment of verified map of a property with registration, publicly accessible disaggregated maps can reduce instances of boundary disputes.
  • For E.g. Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) aided property tax collection by bringing 6.29 lakh properties under the tax net.
• Standardisation of geographical addresses: Existing non-uniformity in addresses presents problems for administration and services like police, transportation, firefighting, ambulance, waste management, etc.
  • Costs: Report by a working group of ministers highlighted the absence of uniform addresses causing an annual loss of $10 billion by business inefficiencies and loss of life.

Way forward

• Bring in processes to check misuse: Regulation from a privacy perspective and building government capacity in areas where GIS is likely to be used extensively, such as land titling.
  • Policies to ensure accuracy, fairness, and transparency.

Conclusion: Accurate and widely accessible geospatial data can set off a wave of service delivery rationalisation and resource optimisation through democratisation of data collection and access.