Gurugram uses drones for digital mapping of land management

Putting latest technology to use, HARSAC and local administration used 24 satellites and drones to prepare digital map of the district along with geo-referencing to create the “most accurate maps” for land records management.

“These maps are the most accurate maps of India ever used in land records management, as on today. This enables the district administration to do the geo-referencing at land holding/land parcel level which hitherto has been done for the first time,” Gurugram Deputy Commissioner TL Satyaprakash said. The UDAAN project along with G-Triangulation has been awarded National e-governance award for the year 2016-17 by the Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms.

The project, funded by District innovation Fund, aimed to provide complete spatial referencing of the land holdings. The Haryana State Remote Sensing Application Centre (HARSAC) along with local administration implemented the project.

This is expected to reduce errors in land records that crept in during the period 1957 to 2016, Satyaprakash said. Triangulation is a concept where at least three points are necessary to identify an area and 35 points of Survey of India were used to create infinite number of references.

Incidentally, Satyaprakash said majority of these reference points established during Todarmal era had vanished.

“In order to reestablish, a cluster of 24 satellites were used in tandem for further refining the reference point network... For creating these digital maps Unmanned Aerial Vehicles were used,” he said.

He said the most accurate maps used for land record management in Asia is 20 cm to that extent Gurugram uses Asia’s most accurate maps as on today.

“This methodology resulted in resolution of several land records and for Manesar tehsil over 2,800 acers compromising of 1,500 issues were resolved. The difference in area registered in Right of Records was brought down from 7.39 per cent to 0.01 per cent” he said.

Use of Google maps would have resulted in error with a tolerance limit of 1.5 metres while land record manual allows an error less than 1.5 metresj, Satyaprakash said.

“In order to limit the errors to sub-metre range drones — six-winged drone and octocopter drone — were used,” he said.

On whether this method could be used for digital mapping in urban areas, Satyaprakash said there are some problems as the drone could not image urban Gurugram due magnetic interference and nose-dived thrice.

Going forward, the Deputy Commissioner said the plan is to connect this land data with several government databases and to link the digital map to Aadhaar.

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