Experts discuss ways to transform India through Geospatial knowledge, infrastructure at post-budget webinar on tech-enabled development

New Delhi [India], March 3 : In a breakaway session of the post-budget webinar on Technology-Enabled Development, the Experts discussed ways for transforming India through geospatial knowledge and infrastructure, informed the Ministry of Science and Technology on Thursday.
The webinar was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
"Data generation and data governance are crucial components of geospatial technologies, and effective collaboration between government, academia, and industry is needed for them. The government is removing all restrictions to resolve the issues for better outreach of the data. Once the data is made accessible, its potential is immense to provide solutions in numerous sectors. In order to effectively implement all these, trained manpower is necessary at all levels," said Dr. Kiran Kumar, former Secretary, Department of Space and former Chairman, ISRO, at the breakaway session titled 'Transforming India through geospatial knowledge and infrastructure: the need for national geospatial policy', led by the Department of Science and Technology (DST).
"We need to have mechanisms in which the government and industry can work as partners; validations can be given to the solutions provided by the industry, and we need the right people with the right skills who can take these initiatives forward. The Budget 2022 discussed the data collection and its accessibility, and this needs to be leveraged," Dr. Kumar added at the webinar on 2nd March 2022. The webinar titled "Technology-enabled development" was organized by Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) along with several scientific ministries and departments of the Government of India.
Dr. Shanthanu Bhatawdekar, Director, EOA & DMS Program Office, ISRO, highlighted that the government should share domain expertise in this area with the private for deeper penetration of the technologies. He also underlined the need for ministries, line departments, and the geospatial industry to work in unison.
"We need a road map for geospatial R&D system, technology generation, education, data sharing, encouraging academic startups, and we need to leapfrog to meet the global benchmark," said Dr. Bharat Lohani, Professor, IIT Kanpur. He also emphasized the need for data standardization and unification.
Dr. Prakash Chauhan, Director, Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (IIRS), Dehradun stressed on enhancing the reach of geo-spatial data in terms of user specifications to be used in different sectors.
"In India, there exist different mechanisms for the generation of data and their availability. A proper channel of updating those data and collating the data is necessary. Besides, we need to create a localized ecosystem to harness the IT capabilities of the country and localized data for creating a foundation for the development of Geo-spatial Technologies. ISRO has created a data set, and it needs to be disseminated through cloud-based services," he added.
Drawing on current geopolitical scenarios, Mr. Rakesh Verma, Chairman, MapMyIndia, underlined the increasing necessity to develop indigenous technologies and disseminate them to the users to minimize the dependency on foreign entities. He said that there is no dearth of talent in India, and hence the Geospatial industry could be Atmanirbhar with such resources.
"We need to develop indigenous software and hardware by supporting indigenous companies, and this would require creating industrial capacity, incubators, mobilizing capital, some of which may be in the form of geospatial industrial development fund, public-private partnerships, international competitiveness, local manufacturing, and finally a sound industrial strategy for manifold growth," said Sanjay Kumar, CEO, Geospatial World.
Abhilasha Purwar, Founder and CEO, Blue Sky Analytics, highlighted ways in which the geospatial data can make India a leader in climate action and discussions by incorporating satellite intelligence and data into the climate discussions.
The final recommendations included leveraging human capital to develop products and solutions using geospatial data, the introduction of new courses at UG and PG level in Geo-informatics, standardization of professional services provided by surveyors and GIS professionals through industry-led certification.
Final recommendations also included research emphasis in areas like high-resolution Geospatial datasets. The recommendations also involved encouraging local cloud services, improvement of public procurement by way of quality RFP documents, developing expertise in evaluating and certifying tender works as per laid out specification, moving beyond tenders to collaborate with industry, leveraging government data and technology of the industry to build revenue models, improvement in capital availability to start ups and other businesses, geospatial investment fund, geospatial industry development strategy as well as sectoral development plans.