INDIA’S GEOSPATIAL ECONOMY

ChinmayaIAS Academy - Current Affairs October 12, 2022 GS3 Leave a comment 241 Views

India’s geospatial economy is expected to cross Rs 63,000 crore by 2025 at a growth rate of 12.8% and to provide employment to more than 10 lakh people mainly through Geospatial Start-Ups.
This was stated here today by Union Minister for Science and Technology and Ministry of Earth Sciences, Dr Jitendra Singh while addressing the Second United Nations World Geospatial Information Congress (UN-WGIC) 2022 in Hyderabad today.
The 5-day conference is being attended by over 2,000 delegates including 700 plus international delegates & participants from about 150 countries.
Moreover, National Mapping Agencies (NMAs) like the Survey of India, which has a glorious history of 255 years, senior officials, non-governmental organizations, academia, and industry, user, & private sector from across the globe are taking part in the Geospatial Congress.
The current boom of technology-led start-ups, there are around 250 Geospatial StartUps in India and to give further boost to this sector, the Minister unveiled a Geospatial Incubator today.
The national organizations like Survey of India, Geological Survey of India, National Atlas and Thematic Mapping Organization (NATMO), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and National Informatics Centre implemented several GIS-based pilot projects across a range of domains like waste resource management, forestry, urban planning, etc. to demonstrate the applications of Geospatial Technology.
The government, industry, researchers, academia, and civil society are coming together to establish quality geospatial ecosystem to build key solutions.
Democratization of Indian geospatial ecosystem will spur domestic innovation and enable Indian companies to compete in the global mapping ecosystem by leveraging modern geospatial technologies and realising the dream of “Atmanirbhar Bharat” or “Self-sufficient India” fully.
Geospatial technology and Geographic Information System (GIS) is going to make significant impact in the way India has been adopting this technology and moving ahead
The world is looking at India as to how it is using technology to tackle some of the major humanitarian and sustainability problems.
Geospatial technologies have been produced, used, and managed in the country for over five decades now, the Government of India’s revolutionary steps towards geospatial democratization, advocacy, and integration over the last few years gave a new momentum to this sector.
The Rural Development Ministry has mapped over 45 lakh km of rural roads by using 21 data layers of the map, which has digitized information regarding water bodies, green areas, plots, and other structures essential for administrative purposes.
nearly 2.6 lakh gram panchayat had been covered by the ministry under the scheme of mapping and digitization.
Evolving technologies in geospatial sector has brought about transformational changes whereby even an inch of a land in India can be mapped, thereby providing solid backups for Indian land reforms.
The growing needs of skilled geospatial manpower, several universities introduced Geospatial Science and Technology based courses to build human resource capacity and many research projects were taken up, to develop the availability of trained Geospatial manpower.
These measures have opened up the untapped opportunity to develop an international GIS services market for the Indian geospatial industry.
Indian Minister told the UN Geospatial Congress that the world has advanced from the traditional definition of geospatial information and its applications to a much more dynamic definition of geospatial solution of real-life problems using modern technologies like digital twins and the meta-verse.
The world has come a long way from the days of using paper maps for finding places to adopting spatial intelligence in everyday decisions.
The recent Covid-19 pandemic management is a remarkable example where geo-enabled technology was used to develop a health service app, which helped in identifying containment zones, aided in monitoring citizen movement, administrating vaccines and ensuring social distancing.
Other geo-enabled technologies helped in managing activities like sanitizing hotspots, establishing telemedicine facilities for remote health care and diagnosis, and analysing infrastructure availability to address the health crisis.