Source : The Business Line Date 16.02.2009
‘GIS must be integrated with national e-governance’
Phalguna Jandhyala
Hyderabad, Feb. 11 The Union Government has been urged to look at integrating geographic information system (GIS) with the national e-governance programme.
“E-governance to me means embedding geospatial information, maps of different types showing resource usage, where the education and health facilities are located and so on. All these are GIS applications,” Ms Preetha Pulusani, Director, Rolta India, told Business Line on the sidelines of the Map World Forum here on Wednesday.
She added that the Government should look at making GIS applications more pervasive.
Ms Pulusani said that budgetary allocation for GIS must be increased like it has been done for the information technology sector.
“GIS has always been taken as a very special and niche area. GIS has hardly been looked at by the Government from a strategic and long-term perspective, rather it was looked at as project based rather than enterprise wise,” she said.
Welcoming the move to set up an independent regulator for the sector, Ms Pulusani said such a body must be inclusive and have representatives from the private sector and the academia and not just with Government focus.
“As the Map Policy frees up digital map information, we will be able to deploy more applications in this area. The industry should look at the developed countries where such applications have been deployed to replicate here,” she said.
Earlier, speaking at a session on Geospatial Technology – Development and Trends, Mr Mark Steele, Chief Operating Officer, Tele Atlas Asia Pacific, said, “Navigational devices are no longer a novelty. Soon navigation devices will be ubiquitous just like the mobile phones.”
He also said that the future of digital maps will have higher levels of accuracy but for this collection is the key.
“The new applications and digital maps of the future will have more personal information and this will be the next wave that we will ride,” Mr Steele added.
