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Jack Dangermond, President of the California-based Environmental Systems Research Institute, a $480 million Geographic Information System (GIS) company, was in Delhi recently to sign an MoU with the government's Department of Science and Technology (DST) on the "Mapping Your Neighbourhood" project. He speaks to BT's Sahad P.V. on the project and the potential for GIS in India. Q. What are the aims of the 'Mapping Your Neighbourhood' project? A. This will help centralised planning in villages of India where the local administrators take responsibility for planning infrastructure and development. The Survey of India (a part of DST with whom the deal has been signed) can participate by getting kids involved in actual map-making for the villages. This will also give kids better geographical sense and mapping. This will help them understand the environment and their geography, which will make them better business people or decision-makers. Q. How well gave geographical information systems developed in India? A. I have been coming here for the past 16 years. My first visit seems like in the dark ages. Now virtually every business in large cities like Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore, besides national agencies, use GIS. So I would say it's growing enormously. There must be about 1,000 institutions that have acquired our software and have built information systems with tens of thousands of seats of high-quality professional users. This will continue. This is bringing big benefits to Indian institutions in four areas. One is cost savings. Second is better decision making. For instance, where to locate establishments such as commercial stores, libraries, hospitals and so on. The third is improved communication through 3-D mapping and visualisation. And finally, it's making improvements in science -- in healthcare and epidemiology. For instance, one can track the spread of communicable diseases like malaria and SARS. Q. How big is the Indian GIS market? A. There are five segments -- GIS data creation, software, hardware, applications software and people. Though it is hard measure the exact market size, it would be hundreds of millions of dollars. Our software revenues in India are between $5-10 million. But the software is just 5-7 per cent of the total expenditure. People spend a lot of money on data. Q. What are challenges for the growth of GIS in India? A. The biggest one is the lack of a clear policy on data. For instance, there are military restrictions on the dissemination of data for security considerations. But it's kind of a false policy, damaging India. Because you can buy much higher resolution data on the web than that is permissible here from the government agencies. So data restriction is the biggest bottleneck. In our meeting with the President of India, he has promised to look at the policy so that Indian society can take advantage of GIS.
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