Nature Remembers You...

Nature Remembers You...
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Monday, September 13, 2010

Geospatial Industry: Bitten by Identity Bug..

A huge lot of contracts for the survey and mapping are being awarded throughout the country to the firms interested in entering into the business. The mega sales team entering the GoI offices have increased their rounds, each targetting a client to boost their sales. Similarly state government departments hanging large projects to lure the industry enterents. To all this we are yet to frame a overarching geospatial policy, when mapping was restricted to 11 entities, since then government queitly opened the policy. A large amount at stake the industrial houses entered into the business of Geospatial services. Very few became successful in completing the projects, even departments flattered after investing huge amount on spatial data creation and so call building 'GIS' capabilities.

What the industry is lacking? As a expert we can feel the lack of training and exposure of the government towards the technology and its potentials. The companies are interested in selling their product then improving the geospatial business of the clients. The solutions and hardwares are sold in bulk (from mid 1990s to 2005) to increase the sales pitch and enter into the services area (where solutions needs to be customised). As industry dealing with customization in the geospatial solutions are negligible the clients are not backing the new ideas and enterents in the field.

There are plenty of pilot projects abadoned in order to avoid the challenges of implementation and responsibility towards the technology developers. The huge tracking and services market is being ballooned out in last two years with solutions not approaching clients as per their requirements or neither the clients allowing any changes in existing protocols. Thus creating a deadlock on the technology penetration and development. Large corporates though have capacity to play a key role in industry finds lagging behind in development of human resources.

Our universities and institutions of higer learning have failed to educate professionals on this technology, ever since a lot of universities have started Masters programme of Geoinformatics/GIS/RS the trainers are hard to find. The teaching material itself is highly underdeveloped and not available in the right format. The dependence on the government run application centre for the research on RS/GIS is paying bad divindings in country like India. The research outputs and learning were never seriously documented and presented to the community outside. Lets see how we deal with this new identity bug

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