Rs 3,000 cr National Geographical Information System project to map India gets green light

C Shivakumar

Chennai:

India will soon have a detailed map of entire nation which will be much sharper and more accurate than the Google maps following the completion of the Rs 3,000 crore National Geographical Information System (NGIS) project, according to department of science and technology secretary Dr T Ramaswami.

Speaking to Express after laying the foundation for Rs 30 crore Directorate building of Geospatial Data Centre for Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Andaman and Nicobar Islands and International Advanced Research Centre for Power Metallurgy and New Materials opposite Perungudi MRTS station, he said the project is being initiated jointly by department of space, department of science and technology and Survey of India.

He said the Union government has given its approval to the project and it will soon be included in the 12^th five-year plan.

Ramaswami said the map would be more sharper and accurate than the Google. Interestingly, the National GIS is envisaged as a fundamental component of India's critical democratic and governance infrastructure, providing support to many aspects of the national economic and governance process and where provide a national GIS programme, infrastructure, policy, and

applications would benefit the nation.

Ramaswami said the five year project would initially target five states in the next 18 months and after that the entire nation will be mapped. The locational maps will be stitched into 41 layers of information, he added.

The National GIS will be made easily accessible and available to a wide variety of users within government, enterprise and the citizens. It will be seen that investment for a National GIS must be a core responsibility of the government as it will help bring Technology and People together on an open and transparent GIS Platform.

Currently, many surveys that the government undertakes are all in silos. The project will put all these data sets together and integrate them into one platform.

Establishing a National GIS will benefit:

1. Create a well maintained collection of geospatial datasets to allow national use, published via standard web services so that government and private sector entities and citizens have the same national view of GIS data

2. Create Standards for National geospatial datasets, Standards for geospatial web services, Standards for geospatial data exchange, Standards for quality, Standards for metadata

3. Promote ‘virtual geographic information’ through crowd-sourcing transactional workflows that allow users to remotely update and add content to designated layers within the National GIS datasets