Hyderabad: Union Jal Shakti minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat said that India’s geospatial economy was set to grow from Rs 41,600 crore to Rs 61,000 crore by 2025.
Geospatial data refers to data references of a location and includes data obtained by GPS and technologies like LiDAR (light detection and ranging), satellite and aerial imagery. The data is used to analyse, model, simulate and analyse different situations.
The minister said geospatial pilot projects being implemented in agriculture, rural development, forestry, water resources management and urban planning showed the strength of the nation in the field.
He was speaking at GeoSmart 2022, a three-day annual event has 2,500 delegates of allied sectors from India and abroad. The conference is co-hosted by the Indian Society of Remote Sensing and the Indian Society of Geomatics.
He cited the deployment of the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) of Isro as an implementing agency of the national hydrology project to underline the effective use of geospatial technologies in the field of water resources.
Shekhawat urged the government, industry and academia to join hands to develop geospatial infrastructure to support national development.
In the first plenary session of the conference, Rama Devi Lanka, the director of the emerging technologies wing of the Telangana government, spoke about the state’s initiatives in creating a geospatial database, web-based geographic information system and monitoring.
“Initiatives have been taken to deploy the latest technologies in the agriculture domain, where field segmentation and crop classification are done to increase sustainability and resilience of agriculture landscape,” she said. The official said information was being made available to the farmers for crop-area estimation, pest prediction, crop health and moisture condition, she said.
Dr Prakash Chauhan, president of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing, Dr Raj Kumar, president of the Indian Society of Geomatics, and Dr M. Ravichandran, secretary of the Union earth sciences ministry, were present.
