Geospatial services that use geographical data in planning and decision-making, currently net a combined revenue of $40-45 billion in India and around 9 million Indians use them on a daily basis, according to a new report.

“Geospatial services deliver efficiency gains in diverse fields of the Indian economy that are valued at many times the size of the sector itself,” the report, brought out jointly by GIS software firm ESRI India and management consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG), said.

Cost savings

The sector alone amassed revenue of $4 billion in 2016. Besides, the use of geospatial services leads to annual cost savings of up to $75 billion, it said.

The geospatial services industry comprises companies that process the location data, produce geo-enabled software and devices and those industries that rely on geospatial data to generate insights, the report titled Location Intelligence in Business Analytics: Insights and Competitive Advantage, said.

Wide applications

Geospatial services are now used widely in infrastructure building, public planning as well as in consumer goods and services industry.

The primary ingredients of geospatial services are electronic maps, satellite imagery, human data such as street names or demographic information and environmental data like elevation of a particular area or weather information.

“Location has now become a core component of business decision making. Since entities can be tagged by location, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) find varied applications ranging from changes in wether patterns to traffic management in crowded cities to location-based services,” said Agendra Kumar, President of ESRI India.

Revenue from govt

In India, the government departments and organisations are the major users of geospatial data and services. “Currently 70 per cent of our revenue comes from the government sector. As of now, usage of GIS is growing both in the government and private sector. But, the private sector is growing faster,” said Kumar of ESRI, which is one of the major GIS-based software providers in the world.

Location-based services markets and technology appear to be growing exponentially. It is forecast to nearly triple over the next eight years globally, the report said. The geospatial industry has been growing rapidly with “geo” getting embedded in more and more workflows, said Sanjay Sinha, a geo analytics expert at BCG, who authored the report.

“GIS has become an integral part of decision making, project planning and implementation and subsequent monitoring. A lot of GIS gets used in high level decision-making. That was earlier missing in India. Of late, a number of consulting companies and non-governmental orgnisations are coming to India to offer consulting services which has a lot of GIS oversight, he said.

He cited the example of the Union Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation ‘geo-tagging’ all wells, including borewells under its custody so that water supply can be better planned and organised. Similarly, the technology is also used in MNGREA scheme for geo-tagging assets that have been created under the project, Sinha said. States are also using GIS data widely. For instance, the J&K government is using GIS to map its healthcare facilities and educational systems and linking this information to demographic details of the population to plan more efficiently, said Kumar.

Manpower shortage

The acute shortage of skilled manpower, Kumar said, is a major challenge that the industry currently faces.

“The way the applications are mushrooming, the country will require a lot of people with the knowledge of GIS technology. While the total number of students with GIS knowledge passing out every year is less than 1,000, we need between 5,000 and 10,000 new recruits a year,” said Kumar.

Absence of a clear-cut geospatial policy, multiple regulatory agencies and extreme low telecom bandwidth are the other major challenges faced by the industry.

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