Indian GIS data – bright future ahead !

On AUGTICS front, exciting time and smart & hard work continues. The real estate/community portal development is coming along nicely with the team doing exceptional job in not just coding but coming up with superb ideas. I continue to engage prospective clients, partners, investors and getting content and AUGTICS ready for website and portal launch!! I somehow stole some time to write this post…

Today morning, in my RSS Feedreader box, a specific news caught my attention: Mumbai Police Implement Intergraph Public Safety System . Years back, I had made a presentation to a group of over 20 high level police officials of an IT savvy southern Indian state and while they all were very excited about using GIS applications and saw enormous benefits in implementing it, non-availability of detailed mapping data became the show stopper. It appears that things are now changing..

Map World Forum was a good place to gauge the mood of the industry. Each and every person I met was extremely excited about how their companies are growing and about the future potential. That’s confirmed from the information from the publicly traded companies like Infotech and Rolta and quick ramp-up of a Hyderabad bases GIS start-up company Geospace Integra to close to 100 people mark within the first year of inception!! Most of this growth is driven by outsourcing, but there is a lot happing around in India, which, in future, is likely to change the Indian GIS scenario significantly! Let’s take a different view…

Recently I logged on to ORKUT to learn a bit about how community and networking portals work (I need some of that knowledge for AUGTICS). To my surprise I found several GIS related communities. Here are some interesting tit-bits that I found from ORKUT:

• There are over 20 GIS communities on ORKUT and the biggest community has over 1300 members with more than 90% from India!
• My search for people above 30 years of age in the GIS word retuned just 20 (and for above 35 only 4) people from the list of thousands!
• There are ORKUT communities of companies like Infotech, RMSI, Rolta etc and that posts on them can give you some insight on the company cultures.
• From the various posts. I quickly assimilated a list of over 60 companies working in GIS arena. List indicates that all the major SW companies (Infosys, Wipro, Satyam etc, apart from TCS) have their own GIS staff /divisions.
• IBM India is working on AutoDesks Mapguide (?!)
• Collage students are developing digital maps of India at Google Hyderabad office!

In the last few days these were the two news of that are worth taking note of (click on the links to read more)

• Delhi 2021 master plan document has a specific mention of GIS mapping
• NIIT-GIS to increase headcount to 500 by ‘07

From other sources, I also learned that:

• Indian government is planning a massive GIS mapping budget that will far exceed the current SOI budget
• Navteq is developing India street navigation data
• Microsoft also has plans for India data development.

I also recently visited mapmyindia site and it’s heartening to see increased data on this site.

So can we find a trend from this? Yes, at least one- there is focus on the Indian data development!!!

In the coming days, with government and industry initiative, we can expect a lot of data to come in public domain or be available from private sources at a reasonable cost. This will act as a fuel for growth of GIS applications in India. A growth where India focused applications impacting the masses will be developed, where applications will be developed to solve the Indian consumer problems. A growth that will only be limited by our imagination, innovations or availability of trained manpower!

It will not be a surprise if data availability acts as a catalyst for more and more international players to come and focus on Indian GIS market to sell their concepts and products! So, an exciting time lies ahead for the Indian GIS industry!!

Manoj Misra

PS:
1. Thanks you for posting comments as well as your direct emails and SMSs to me. Keep writing and sending your feedback. It’s helpful and really appreciated.

2. Apart from the data development activities, there are significant developments happening on the Product Development, Remote Sensing and software application development in the Indian GIS market. Stay tuned to hear more!

3. Yogendran @ IIC has done a wonderful analysis of GIS industry in 2000. The report is at GIS Lounge and it still makes an interesting read!!

Original and different thoughts from Manoj Misra www.manojmisra.com