India’s First Open Source Integrated Geospatial Data Observatory Launched

Hyderabad: India Observatory, country’s first socio, economic, ecological open source integrated Geospatial data platform, was launched on Tuesday at Hyderabad in GeoSmart India conference. The observatory is a comprehensive information on India’s social, ecological and economic parameters on a single spatial and temporal platform designed to supplement local level decision making by village communities, panchayats, NGOs and government officials.

India Observatory (IO) has ‘India Data Platform’ at its core, which is built on open source and brings together data on over 1,600 parameters, ranging from village to national level in form of maps, graphs, tables and infographics. It is freely available.

The Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), CEO, Jagdeesh Rao Puppala, said, “There are vast data sets, algorithms and tools available from various government and non-government organisations. The data is too technical and difficult for ordinary citizens to interpret. Most of these datasets are sector focused and they are not integrated. The India Observatory is a solution for it. Data ranging from census to agriculture information, infant mortality rate to health status, rivers, groundwater contamination, biodiversity of species all the data is available on one platform called www.indiaobservatory.org.in.”
The observatory has 90% of India’s open data, some from 1951 and some from 1991, to till date. “We have done geospatial mapping where data can be visualised on maps easily,” said Jagdeesh Rao.
He said, “Using latest advancements of IT, GIS, remote sensing and telecommunication, IO has developed 11 platforms and tools, which are being used by seven divisions of forest departments in Himachal, Rajasthan and Telangana, programmes of four state governments, and National Institute of Rural Development under Antyodaya Yojana.”
IO tools can work offline on smartphones and are available in local languages. For instance, the composite landscape assessment and restoration tool (CLART) helps to identify best areas for groundwater recharge under MGNREGA scheme. GEET, or GIS-enabled entitlement tracking system, builds awareness on entitlements for marginalised communities by tracking eligibility at household level.

Source: TOI

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