The National Geospatial Policy 2022 will help the sector grow exponentially and encourage the development of applications in sectors such as agriculture, transportation, healthcare and urban infrastructure, said Srikant Sastri, Co-founder, Crayon Data.
To explain the impact, he drew a parallel between the introduction of the policy and the roll-out of the Unified Payment Interface (UPI).
Sastri, also the Chairperson of the Geospatial Data Promotion & Development Committee (GDPDC), pointed out that UPI brought innovative solutions to various sectors and became a resounding success among consumers. Similarly, the geospatial policy has liberalised the sector and enabled access and usage of geospatial data across industries and entities, he said while speaking at TiE-con Delhi-NCR, which was held March 9-10.
“Geospatial industry is a $512 billion industry globally. In India, we remain miniscule, mainly because it’s been tightly regulated for national security reasons. The hope is that by liberalising this, you can really unleash the creativity and innovation of the Indian private sector and startups. Because of UPI, you had a whole fintech explosion. So we believe that with geospatial data, and a huge AI platform, you can actually have a whole bunch of solutions and applications that can impact every sector of the economy, whether it’s agriculture, transportation, livelihoods, financial services, healthcare, or urban infrastructure, etc. You can build applications in all the sectors,” he said.The GDPDC is creating a Unified Geospatial Interface (UGI) that will provide access to all geospatial data collected from every government department, including satellite images, drone images, aerial survey images, soil data, weather data, etc, Sastri said.
Giving examples of geospatial applications, he pointed out that healthcare and pharma players can use the data to map areas in the country where a particular set of herbs or crops are required for their products to grow. “Even in urban infrastructure. Many of you may know that most city corporations collect barely 40% of the property tax that they should be collecting. Why? Because properties have not been mapped well enough. It’s hard to go and map properties. But using space, satellite images and a combination of other things, you can very accurately map all of these properties. So as you can see, the possibilities are literally endless,”
Among other sectors, he added that geospatial data can help optimise e-commerce deliveries; aid insurance companies to create more targeted products; and help farmers understand weather predictions.
