Cartography can accelerate India's development: Kalam

New Delhi, Nov 22 (UNI) President A P J Abdul Kalam today said the Cartographic community has a key role to play in national development by providing value added services to all national missions.

Pointing out that India had a vision of transforming itself into a developed nation before 2020, the President said all the flagship programmes of the government for achieving this goal required vital cartographic inputs at the stage of planning and implementation levels.

Dr Kalam made the remarks while inaugurating a seminar on Cartography-Expanding Horizons, organized by Indian National Cartographic Association (INCA) in collaboration with Survey of India.

Among such schemes were the Bharat Nirman Programme including PURA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas), networking of rivers, infrastructure development in 63 cities through Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewable Mission, mapping of earthquake prone areas and recurring floods in north Bihar and Assam.

The mission of INCA should be to assist the implementation of developed India vision using their core competence in cartography in partnership with ISRO, NRSA, Survey of India, State Remote Sensing centers, Thematic map making organizations, Indian Remote Sensing Industries, Academia, Research Institutions and other IT organizations, he added.

Dr Kalam said India had planned to launch a series of satellites specifically for cartographic applications. The first in the series, CARTOSAT-I launched in May 2005 was the first high resolution satellite that would collect the details of terrain surface in stereo mode with the spatial resolution of 2.5 meters.

As of today, he stated that more than 90 per cent of the country was covered with stereo images. These images could also be used for better urban planning, cadastral level information of land and water resources. This satellite mission has enabled developing Digital Elevation Model (DEM).

This elevation model was useful in GIS (Geographical Information System) environment, providing a terrain model to facilitate drainage network analysis, watershed demarcation, erosion mapping, contour generation and quantitative analysis like location-distance-area-volume calculation.

The DEM could also provide scene simulation and fly through visualization of the terrain. Dr Kalam outlined six missions relevant to vision 2020 for immediate implementation for the cartographers. Among them were: * Creating a network of all organizations and cartographers participating in this Congress so that they can interface and provide inputs for the development of modern cartographic products required for national development missions.

* Bringing out large scale maps using advanced technologies for various national development programmes like PURA, interlinking of rivers, survey/resurvey of cadasters, Urban development, metro rail, water ways.

* Provide cartographic inputs to drought, flood and earthquake prone areas to the disaster management teams for effective planning of disaster management delivery system.

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