NATION WIDE MOVEMENT FOR CREATING NEIGHBOURHOOD MAPS ON THE ANVIL
A nationwide
movement, which will involve school children across the country
for creating neighbourhood maps, is on the anvil. Mapping, here,
will mean not only mapping of the terrain and the physical features
of the country, but mapping of natural resources, cultural resources
and traditional knowledge resources of the community. The village
government, i.e. the Panchayat, will be integrally involved in
the exercise so that the information generated feeds directly
into the process of decentralised community governance. For the
children, production of knowledge would become the primary means
of learning. In other words, instead of learning geography and
history and environmental sciences from books, children will learn
by producing knowledge of relevance for their community. It is
expected that this eventually become a national movement and each
village will have a village spatial data infrastructure and a
village GIS(Geographic Information System) which has been created
by the school children. This was stated by Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi,
Union Minister for Human Resource Development and Science &
Technology. He was inaugurating the First Map Asia – 2002, international
conference and exhibition, in Bangkok, Thailand today.
For making
these maps, the Survey of India, the Indian Space Research Organisation
(ISRO), various Institutes of Technology and University Departments
of Geo-spatial Sciences and Centre for Spatial Database Management
& Solutions (CSDMS) – will fan out to hundreds of schools
and use teams of senior school children along with their teachers.
The teams will be equipped both with conventional devices like
compasses, plane table instruments, etc. as well as palmtop computers
with a built-in GPS receiver to enable the school children to
start mapping their neighbourhood.
Dr. Joshi
also spoke about establishment of India’s National Spatial Data
Infrastructure, an initiative taken by the Survey of India, Department
of Science and Technology and Department of Space. This initiative
aims to provide an overarching framework within which all the
major spatial data producing agencies of the Central Government
will come together to form a virtual digital infrastructure of
data, information and knowledge in the geo-spatial arena. This
virtual infrastructure will make the rich and abundant data assets
of these organisations readily available and easily accessible
through a decentralised internet platform to a vast community
of users. But, Dr. Joshi pointed out that such infrastructure
will serve little purpose unless it impacts on the daily lives
of small communities – at the village and urban neighbourhood
levels and empower them into using information and knowledge for
their socio-economic transformation and a better quality of life.
It requires that communities play a role in the production of
knowledge itself and technologies and infrasturctural support
is available to them to shift from being mere passive consumers
of knowledge produced elsewhere.
Dr. Joshi
during his speech underlined the inherent uniqueness of the Asian
Civilisation. He also quoted the Japanese Art Historian Okakura
Tenshin who has said that "not even the snowy barriers’ between
Chinese and Indian civilisations ‘can interrupt for one moment
the broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which
is the common thought of every Asiatic race". He said that Asia
has now to take the lead, based on its profound civilisational
understanding of man and nature, to evolve a new paradigm of community
governance which is decentralised and democratic, which uses geo-spatial
sciences and technologies in their most sophisticated form to
wrest control and initiative for itself.
Map Asia
–2002 has been organised by The Asian Institute of Technology,
Centre for Spatial Database Management and Solutions and Geoinformatics
and Space Technology Development Agency. This Conference, the
first of its kind, will be attended by the national Mapping Organisations
of Asian countries, Scientists and Technologists working in the
field and representatives of industry. The conference is expected
to lead to initiation of major regional level programmes in which
India can take a leadership role. India has among the oldest histories
of excellence in spatial data production and use, with organisations
like Survey of India, being over 237 years old. Rapid advancements
in Indian space technology and the emergence of a large GIS industry
give India a major advantage in assuming a leadership role.
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