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Media Lab Asia designs online rural GIS maps on handheld

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CIOL Bureau
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Sudarshana Banerjee



NEW DELHI: The Geographical Information System (GIS) software by Media Lab Asia, referred to as 'GramChitra' (Village Picture) is a free open-source GIS software on Embedded Linux environment. It allows users to create new maps and key in data directly on the handheld device and later synchronize it with the PC. It enables users to measure the distance between two places on the map or work out geographical characteristics of an object like perimeter, area, and others.






"It had begun as a tool to help the Panchayats with resource mapping, but is ending up as the world’s first online rural GIS on a handheld," said Manish Prasad, director, CSDMS.





And the mapping could not have been simpler… in the village of Riwazpur (to cite an example), 25 km from Delhi, some young village boys peer intently at a gadget in their hands as they walk around the village. A few hundred kilometers up in the stratosphere, a network of satellites tracks their moves. By the end of the day, they have covered their tiny village -- and generated the first comprehensive map of it, captured on the crisp color screen of a handheld computer.





A module called ChalChitra (Moving Picture) integrates the handheld computer with a GPS allowing users to plot the distance between two points by simply walking the distance between them. (It was the ChalChitra feature that the youth of Riwazpur had been using to create the village maps and it took them 12 days to be trained. However, ongoing research is expected to simplify the systems further so that all villagers could be trained within a matter of hours. The research team is also developing additional utilities for on-line data storage, editing, querying, etc)





Media Lab Asia has entered into a relationship with Encore Simputers and the GIS software is primarily targeted at handhelds like the iPAQ or the Simputer. "But developing a desktop based GIS application will also not be difficult," clarified Prasad, "we have the basic technology in place." For the time being, the software parcel is to be limited for rural resource mapping only, but according to Prasad, it will be invaluable for urban developers as well, offering the sophisticated 3D analysis as part of the package. Talks are already on of using the same as part of the digitization of land records process (akin to the "Bhoomi’ project in Karnataka).





Speaking to CNS, Bimal Sareen, newly appointed managing director and CEO of Media Lab Asia, elaborated that Media Lab Asia has a lot of ambitious projects lined up, in keeping with its aim of bringing IT to the masses.





As far as the GramChitra project is concerned, Prasad elaborated that the nature of partnership between CSDMS and Media Lab Asia is purely a non-profit research collaboration, on a man-month reimbursement basis and all IPR lie with the Media Lab Asia. There has been a dedicated team of seven working on the project for some eleven months, he informed. The average salary of the same would be around Rs 15,000. (A little back of the envelope calculations show that so far the financial nature of the partnership for CSDMS has been - seven people, working for 11 months, at a Rs 15,000 average monthly salary = Rs 11,55,000). The Media Lab Asia provided all hardware support. There is however a different relationship and a different team working on the social GIS partnership, he added.





It is interesting to note that GIS was so far used only by the chosen few -- cost of GIS packages– ranging from Rs 65,000 to Rs 500,000 ($1,300 to $10,000) – ensured that GIS was used only by scientists and engineers. A low-cost GIS tool however can have multiple application areas -- village resources management for water wells, tube wells, etc.; census data collection, revenue maps, epidemiological data collection for rural healthcare, etc. The Right to Information Bill being cleared by the Parliament sometime soon, would also have a major impact on the growth of GIS.





"Earlier there were several restrictions on using digital maps, but a 1:25000 scale map is viable now," added Prasad.


















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