Department of Science and Technology (DST) issued a new set of guidelines under the National Map Policy 2005. For the first time, the government has made it clear that ordinary citizens can create, collect, publish, and keep maps (both physical and digital) without asking the government for permission or getting security approvals. This is a welcome step that should have been taken decades ago.
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It stands in stark contrast to the draconian Draft Geospatial Information Regulation Bill, 2016, which effectively banned the acquisition of geospatial data (i.e., mapping information) without a government licence. Had it passed, it would effectively have rendered all unlicensed maps (or even collecting of underlying data for a map) illegal, and in its plain reading would have penalized students drawing inaccurate maps during their geography lesson. Thankfully, that proposed Bill never materialized into an Act.
The contrast between the guidelines and the Bill shows how the central government is not a monolith: different bureaucrats and ministers take drastically different approaches to the same issue.
Before getting into the advantages of the move, here is a rundown on what the data means:
What is geospatial data?
Geospatial data represents features or objects on the Earth’s surface. Whether it’s man-made or natural, if it has to do with a specific location on the globe, then it’s geospatial.
How is geospatial data used?
The most common use of geospatial data is within a GIS (Geographic Information System) to understand spatial relationships and to create maps describing these relationships. A GIS can also help you regulate, customize, and analyze geospatial data.
How will this help Indian tech companies?
Geospatial data is foundational and will play a vital role in every manner of planning, governance, services, infrastructure, and applications.
A Boost to Open-Source Mapping
The new guidelines emphasize mapping data as an asset to be used for India’s benefit. With the new guidelines, high resolution mapping by private citizens, which in some cases was already being undertaken in a gray zone of legal uncertainty, will become clearly legal.
“Street view” maps, which show photographs superimposed onto maps to create a virtual reality experience, are also legalized. Importantly, all existing geospatial data produced by any central government entity using public funds is required to be publicly shared—free of charge with other government departments, and at a “fair and transparent” fee for others.
Given how guarded departments have been of their data, this is quite revolutionary. However, as with the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy, the National Open Standards Policy, and the RTI Act, revolutionary policies and laws are only as revolutionary as their implementation would allow them to be. There is some room for improvement: non-commercial use of the data should be exempted from fees. Citizens should not be made to pay for non-commercial usage of data that they’ve themselves funded with their taxes.
These guidelines are welcome news to India’s burgeoning community of open-source mapping. The largest such volunteer-driven mapping effort, OpenStreetMap (OSM), powers everything from the maps used by taxi aggregators to those used by the United Nations for disaster relief missions. India has unique addressing and navigation challenges that can only be solved through localized research and standardization.
In a city like Bengaluru, streets can be one-way one day and one-way in the reverse direction the next, and often directions are used instead of addresses. Such bureaucratic caprice and mapping realities can only be reflected in a digital map with some amount of accuracy by decentralized volunteer-driven projects, which have the potential to be both faster and more detailed. Further, if you go to remote parts of India, such as the hinterlands of Himachal Pradesh, you will find that commercial maps such as Google Maps do not provide nearly the same amount of detail as volunteer-driven OSM, to which anyone can contribute.
Need Collaboration, not Protectionism
While the new guidelines bring much-necessary liberalization, they come along with some protectionist measures as well. They prevent non-Indian entities from enjoying the new licence-free regime. They also require that maps with spatial accuracy greater than 1 metre horizontally or 3 metres vertically be created by an Indian entity and stored on Indian servers.
This could potentially jeopardize open mapping—while it is predominantly Indians who contribute to efforts like OSM, there’s no restriction placed in such a volunteer-driven effort. Further, OSM servers are located all over the globe, and it is unclear why an India-located server is better.
Lastly, it is also unclear whether these regulations are in line with India’s obligations under the WTO’s GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) framework. A better way to promote Atmanirbhar Bharat in this sector would be to stop depending on foreign companies by requiring government entities to use only maps generated by Indian entities, which are openly licenced, and put no burden on the exchequer.
We have seen the government collaborate with mapping communities in the past. For instance, Mapathon Keralam was launched in 2019 by the Kerala State IT Mission and volunteers to map critical assets in the state for emergency and rescue operations, and was found to be very useful by the Kerala government.
We need more such collaborations to improve everything, from disaster management to bus schedules and routing. To enable this, administration at all levels—central, state, municipal, and taluk—need to work with civic hackers, and ways and means must be found to encourage public-spirited technologists as well as the commercial mapping industry.
As the guidelines recognize, the government also needs to bring other policies, such as those covering remote-sensing and the national spatial data infrastructure, in line with the new guidelines, and streamline the flow of data within the government.
Importantly, stakeholders should be publicly consulted before the formulation of further guidelines and policies, since they can advise the government on how to unlock the full potential of mapping through the usage of open standards and APIs (for technical interoperability), open licences (for legal interoperability), and open metadata and vocabularies (for semantic interoperability), along with insights into civic and developmental issues to tackle with technology.
The DST has shown great sagacity through this commitment to removing the yoke of superfluous regulations that has held India back: now we must move forward to translate this into results on the ground.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.