In a major boost to India’s efforts in Geo-spatial technology, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) announced liberalized guidelines for geo-spatial data. It deregulates access to its geospatial data and services including maps for all Indian entities. The move will aid the country to build more accurate geospatial applications and products. DST will also enable the creation of private sector investment in this field.
Geospatial data is an important emerging data category that can be applied in many different industries. The amount of geospatial data being created is expected to grow exponentially in the next few years.
Geospatial data is the basis for analysis of almost everything in the world today as it is fundamental to communications, commerce, economy, government, and science.
It constitutes an integral part of decision making in fields such as, energy, air transport, telecommunications, logistics, defense, navigation, transportation, GIS (Geographic Information System), and urban development.
The data combines location information, attribute information (the characteristics of the object, event, or phenomena concerned). Other than that, it also includes temporal information or the time of the location or attributes captured.
The application of Geospatial data in our daily lives is increasing. For example, food delivery apps like Swiggy or Zomato, e-commerce app like Amazon, Weather apps, etc., are dependent on Geospatial data.
The government of India has given instructions regarding the release of geospatial data in India. This will help citizens and other stakeholders to obtain high-quality geospatial datasets. The new guidelines will also help with promoting innovation among private parties as they would not need prior permission during the development of social goods and applications that contain geospatial data.
Geospatial data will now be freely available in India, specifically for Indian companies. They will no longer be subject to restrictions or prior approvals to collect, generate, prepare, store, publish, update digital geospatial data and maps within the territory of India.
In the future, third-party services which work with geospatial data will be allowed to carry out activities such as produce, sell, distribute, broadcast, and offer services related to digital geospatial data of India and maps thereof subject to compliance with the guidelines.
The policy restricts the use of terrestrial mapping and surveys to only Indian entities—both public and private. The data generated also needs to be owned and stored in India. Further, high-resolution data—finer than 1 m horizontally and 3 m vertically—will still remain restricted.
With this policy, Indian companies will be able to set up location services like Google Map in India.
There are strict restrictions on the collection, storage, use, dissemination of geo-spatial data, and mapping. It is due to internal as well as external security concerns. The Indian government seemed to have implemented those restrictions earlier this year after the publication of the updated maps from Google Maps.
The government has released the present Policy on Geospatial Data for users, which spells out that individuals and private companies are required to seek approval, for use of mapping data under the Geospatial Information Regulation Act, 2016.