Slashgeo

dct writes "GeoPlace points to an Indian Newspaper story about the planning of land use based on extensive mapping of land. This project seems different than most of the local development initiative in that the mapping covers a very large portion of land and will be used for integrated developement. From the article: "“We will conduct a physical verification on the basis of findings from the satellite images and then prepare the final map. In the final version, specific locations will be identified saying what kind of industry would suit them. Similarly, it can also be found out which plots are suitable for building townships without disturbing agricultural land,’ Sircar said.""

GIS Development links to a story about the Indian military to be a part of GLONASS. From the DNA India article: "In a major step forward in its ambition to use space applications for defence, India is entering into a partnership with Russia to be a part of Glonass. After America's Global Positioning System (GPS), Glonass is currently the only other satellite-based navigation system and it would be available for Indian military applications, sources said. India is also a partner in the European Union's Galileo system, which would be ready by 2008. But since Galileo would only be for civilian use, joining Glonass becomes significant."

All Points Blog links to a short Deccan Herald article about GIS-trained manpower woefully short in India. From the article: "“Though the GIS technology was evolved over 40 years ago, its presence in India is still in a nascent stage,” Mr Gowda said during the inauguration of a two-day State level seminar on ‘GIS and its applications’ at Government Arts College here recently." Meanwhile, Very Spatial links to a The Times of India article about the use of GIS and GPS for police operations in India.

All Points Blog links to a The Hindu article informing us India and Russia will jointly develop the GLONASS-K GPS satellites. From the short article: ""Under the space co-operation agreements signed during President Vladimir Putin's India visit, both countries will jointly develop new generation GLONASS-K satellite for the GLONASS global positioning system, which will function parallelly with the American GPS," Indian Ambassador Kanwal Sibal said. Addressing an internet press conference last evening, he said Russia intends to operationalise GLONASS by 2010 by completing the cluster of 24 satellites."

All Points Blog links to a The Hindu article on the Indian president on cartography and law in India. From the related press release: "President A P J Abdul Kalam today suggested enactment of a law to govern the use of outer space and regulate the use of data acquired from remote sensing satellites, particularly of sensitive installations. [...] He said stereo satellite images, which are available for 90 per cent of the country, could also be used for better urban planning, cadastral level information of land and water resources. Suggesting six missions for cartographers, Kalam said a network of organisations and persons working in the field of mapping should provide inputs for the development of modern cartographic products required by national mission."

All Points Blog links to an article about the use of GIS in rural India. From the article: "Users at the district level downward can today query independent and offline systems that are replete with monthly data, and figure out the most economical and feasible solutions for infrastructure projects. For instance, if a bureaucrat wants to plan a school, he would like to know the number and location of existing schools in the village concerned before deciding where the school must be built."

Slashdot host a story on India safely bringing a satellite from orbit. Their summary: "In a pathbreaking event heralding its arrival as a space power with capability to recover an orbiting satellite, India today successfully brought back a spacecraft to earth, giving a new impetus to the proposed manned mission to space in the next decade."

All Points Blog informs us about Yahoo! Maps added India data. From the blog: "Yahoo has rolled out many goodies for those in India including betas of Yahoo! Our City and Yahoo! India Maps (don't worry, the maps meet government approval). The former is for user generated and Yahoo created content. "

A few recent geoblogs entry discussed the status of webmapping in India. There's Dan Karran's entry on Google's approach to crowdsourcing map data in India, which is on the same topic as the GEB's entry about local knowledge power for India mapping and APB links to an article about tackling urban problems with GIS in India. From the first link: "I was curious about this after the State of the Map conference but it seems last week Michael Jones, the CTO of Google Earth, shone a little light on the subject of Google's crowdsourced maps of India (along with other geo things from Google) at the Cambridge Conference. I've transcribed the part of the podcast that really interested me (see below), describing what they've built up in terms of geodata for 50 Indian cities and how they are doing it with a pilot project to deploy a 'care package' to countries to let the citizens map it for themselves based on local knowledge and Google's excellent aerial imagery sources." See also numerous Indian-related stories below.

Location reports on India's plans for a satellite navigation system. From the article: "India plans to build a constellation of seven geo-stationary satellites at a cost of Rs 1,600 crore to meet the navigational system requirements in cars, trains and aircraft. "Design (of the satellites) is more or less complete. We are in the process of building the first proto model," Secretary in the Department of Space G Madhavan Nair said."

The RFID weblog reports it seems there's a possibility of India to have mandatory RFID for all new produced cars: "The ministry of heavy industries is considering a proposal to make it mandatory to fit RFID-enabled devices in the cars manufactured in India. It will be the responsibility of the car manufacturers to ensure that all new cars have these radio-frequency identification tags. It is believed that RFID tags would help in traffic management as traffic violations by motorists could be tracked and all violations identified. Also, motorists would get charged automatically as soon as they enter a toll area." Additionally, Very Spatial links to the intended monitoring of crops in India on a weekly basis: "This will be a very innovative method of assessing crop composition, crop productivity and crop health on a weekly basis. It is possible to have almost complete data at the village level. The method has been tested and validated on a pilot basis."