At a recent event that marked a year of the updated geospatial policy guidelines, Union Science Minister Jitendra Singh announced that India plans to prepare digital maps of all its 6,00,000 villages and pan-India 3D maps will be prepared for 100 cities. An ongoing scheme, piloted by the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, called SVAMITVA (Survey of Villages and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas) was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April 2020.
“This is in line with the strategic push by the Government of India for adopting these sunrise technologies across national mission-mode projects to achieve the vision of the $5 trillion economy,” the minister said, highlighting that the Prime Minister believed in breaking old taboos and taking bold decisions in unlocking the space sector for private players, joint ventures in Atomic Energy or Drone Policy.
The updated guidelines help private companies to prepare a variety of maps without needing approvals from a host of ministries and make it easier to use drones and develop applications via location mapping. The focus will be to strengthen the Innovative Starts-up ecosystem with huge financial implications and job generation. The Minister assured the stakeholders that a synergy will be brought about in all these sectors to have a multiplier effect. Dr Singh in his speech said that the Trinity of Geospatial Systems, Drone Policy and Unlocked Space Sector will be the hallmark of India’s future economic progress.
The complete geospatial policy would be announced “soon” as the liberalisation of guidelines had yielded very positive outcomes within a year’s time. The Geographical Information based system mapping would also be useful in forest management, disaster management, electrical utilities, land records, water distribution, and property taxation, he added. Dr Singh estimated the size of the Indian Geospatial market in 2020 to be ₹23,345 Crore including ₹10,595 crore of export which was likely to grow to ₹36,300 crore by 2025.
So far drone surveys have covered close to 1,00,000 villages and maps of 77,527 villages had been handed over to states. Property cards had been distributed to around 27,000 villages, according to current information on the SVAMITVA portal.