The Hindu : When computers meet cartography

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Feb 02, 2004

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National

When computers meet cartography

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, FEB. 1. An international conference — Map India 2004 — held in Delhi last week has highlighted both the challenge and the opportunity that computer and satellite-assisted Geographical Information Systems (GIS) offer to India's cartographic community.

The industry here is already doing over $100 million worth of business, mostly in exports to the U.S.; but the global business is worth at least $7 billion, according to estimates made by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM). India is emerging as a major data conversion centre for mapping agencies in the U.S., Europe, Japan and Australia, said NASSCOM President Kiran Karnik.

And for lay Indians there has been one salutary spin-off: The availability for the first time in recent months, of digitally generated maps of their own cities with a level of detail never before available. Last week saw the release of two more products - for Pune and Hyderabad - in the CD-based digital "Mapcue" series for Indian cities created by the Bangalore -based Spatial Data Pvt. Ltd (www.spinfosoft.com) . The company has earlier released CD interactive maps for Chennai, Bangalore and Kochi, with the cooperation of agencies such as the Survey of India and the Indian Institute of Architects. Costing Rs. 495 each, the CDs enable users to click and zoom to areas of interest and also search the database of street and place names and create personal route guides.

The Delhi-based Eicher-Goodearth (www.eichermaps.com) , which brought out India's first city map book for Delhi on the lines of international "A to Z" type street guides has now covered Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai in the series at prices between Rs. 200 and Rs. 300 each. These Indian initiatives for the first time provided customers with maps of their own backyard to international standards — that is a scale ranging from 1: 10,000 to 1:6,250. A web resource (www.indiamapstore.com) enables customers to purchase online Indian map products from multiple sources including Eicher, Spatial Data and TTK.

To take Indian cartography into the digital age the Dehra Dun-headquartered Survey of India has begun to deploy cutting edge tools like digital camera-backed Air-borne Laser Terrain Mapping(ALTM). The Surveyor-General, Prithvish Nag, explained at the Map India conference that the technology being deployed to chart Delhi is a first in the South Asia region.

The upcoming general elections will also benefit from the new digital thrust to cartography in India: M.P. Narayanan, President, Centre for Spatial Database Management and Solutions (which cosponsored the Map India event with Survey of India, National Remote Sensing Agency and the Census of India) announced that digital GIS data was ready for every Assembly and Parliamentary constituency, with boundaries, number of voters and the male-female break-up.

The Delhi conference also highlighted one reality in a satellite surveillance age: restricting one's own citizens to low resolution maps of the order of 1: 50,000 is a futile exercise when satellite views grabbed by cameras sweeping across continents provided detailed pictures which were in many instances available free of charge on the Internet. A January 26 release by NASA, places in the public domain, a vast quantity of imagery snapped by its Shuttle Radar topography mission since 2000. A search at the website of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab photo journal shows that 40 views over the Indian subcontinent — including a view over Kolkatta (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA01844.jpg) and an unusual 3-D image from the Arabian Sea looking at the Rann of Kutch (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA03304.jpg) — can be downloaded in the form of high resolution files in TIFF or JPEG format.

And a final footnote to some of the perils of India's "coming of age" in space-age cartography: the website of the Survey of India (www.surveyofindia.gov.in) has been hacked and today displays a message on behalf of an agency which sports an email address abhortech@linuxmail.org and claims to oppose "bad information" — whatever that means.

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