The Hindu Business Line : Plea to expedite new mapping policy

At the Tele Trans 2004 conference organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry, references were made to the promise of the Union Minister for Science & Technology, Mr Kapil Sibal, that the policy would be brought in by Janaury 2005.

Dr S. Rajagopalan, Managing Director, Spatial Data Pvt Ltd, said that digital maps were of immense use to the industry. He said that lack of such a policy, secrecy surrounding the Indian system for determining co-ordinates and proper addressing system proved to be impediments.

He told Business Line that as per the existing laws, anybody could prepare and sell a printed map of any location in India after checking the accuracy of international borders with Survey of India, provided the map was of a scale of at least 1: 20,000. For better scales, the map producer would have to obtain permission from Survey of India, which in turn would get a clearance from the Ministry of Defence.

For all digital maps, specific permission from Survey of India was necessary, he pointed out. However, the problem is that it takes anywhere between a year and two to obtain the necessary clearances. Worse, for every update on the map, map producer would have to again get the update cleared by the Ministry of Defence through Survey of India.

Dr Rajagopalan hoped that this issue would be addressed by the proposed mapping policy. He said the Government may have a policy on what would be mapped by the private sector and what may not be.

But a company should not have to go to the clearance for every update of the map. "There are two problems with that — it is time consuming and it breeds corruption," he said.

Mr Girish Kumar, Deputy Surveyor General, Survey of India, said that the Survey of India was open to developing applications that use digital maps in collaboration with the corporate sector.

Technically, while it is necessary to obtain Ministry of Defence's permission to sell a digital map, selling an application did not need any such clearance, even if the application was based on a digital map, he said.

Mr Vikas Khitha, Head — GIS & Digital Mapping, Eicher Goodearth Ltd, spoke of the importance of need to protect the intellectual property of digital maps. He also wanted the process of obtaining clearances for mapping an area to be made simpler.

Digital maps find demand from a host of bodies such as companies, banks and law enforcement agencies. For instance, Dr Rajagopalan told Business Line that a multinational bank used digital map to learn that some 3,000 of its 75,000-odd personal loan customers took loans from branches that were far away from their homes or offices.

The most delinquencies happened within this group of 3,000 customers.

The CII conference, which was inaugurated by the Union Minister for Communication and Information Technology, Mr Dayanidhi Maran, focussed attention on the emerging opportunities in the use of telematics. Telematics refers to the use of communication and IT technologies in automobiles.