International Conference on "Spatial Data Infrastructure and its Role in Disaster Management"
October 24, 2005, Chennai

Inaugural Address by Mr. Thiru S Regupathy, Hon'ble Minister of State for Home Affairs

Shri Vinod C Menon, Member, National Disaster Management Authority
Thiru R. Muthu, Chairman, FICCI, Tamilnadu State Council
Mr P Murari, Advisor to the President, FICCI
Ladies and Gentlemen,

India is fast moving into being an information and knowledge society - especially with the emphasis on Information Technology and "transparent-governance". Amongst the variety of datasets that would be involved, spatial (or map) information will be a major "content". These Spatial information sets are vital to make sound decisions at the local, regional, state and central level planning, implementation of action plans, infrastructure development, disaster management support and business development. Natural Resources management, flood mitigation, environmental restoration, land use assessments and disaster recovery are just a few examples of areas in which decision-makers are benefiting from spatial information. Until recently, maps have been a mainstay for a wide variety of applications and decision-making. This is changing as more spatially referenced data and information on a wider variety of topics or themes (e.g., population, land use, economic transactions, hydrology, agriculture, climate, soils) are being produced, stored, transferred, manipulated, and analyzed in digital form.

A new wave of technological innovation is allowing us to capture, store, process and display an unprecedented amount of map information about our country (and the Earth) and a wide variety of environmental and cultural phenomena. With the advent of technology, the information about the earth's surface has become easier in terms of database generation, storage, retrieval and data analysis. Further, creation of computerised database with networking facilities has added a new dimension to the dissemination of information, free flow of data and information exchange for speedy implementation of action plans and their monitoring.

The establishment of the Spatial Data Infrastructure defined as the technologies, policies, and people necessary to promote sharing of geo-spatial data throughout all levels of government, the private and non-profit sectors, and the academic community. The goal of this Infrastructure is to reduce duplication of effort among agencies, improve quality and reduce costs related to geographic information, to make geographic data more accessible to the public, to increase the benefits of using available data and to establish key partnerships with states, counties, cities, tribal nations, academia and the private sector to increase data availability.

In the emerging information, geographic or geo-spatial information occupies a pre-eminent position. In fact, the use of high quality, reliable, geo-spatial information is critical to virtually every sphere of socio-economic activity - disaster management, forestry, urban planning, land management, agriculture, infrastructure development, business, geographic, etc., Much of geo-spatial data is scattered across a large number of organizations, largely in the public sector, following different standards and is not sufficiently integrated and networked to make it really useful to a large community of users.

There is a widespread consensus that spatial data sets need to be integrated to create what is called a geo-spatial data infrastructure. Such infrastructures have been likened to information highways, linking a variety of databases and providing for the flow of information from local to national levels and eventually to the global community. The foundation of any Geo-Spatial Data Infrastructure is the topographic map. The custodian of all topographic data in India has been the Survey of India, which established 233 years ago is probably the oldest scientific institution in the country. The creation of such an infrastructure will be a landmark development of enormous significance for a knowledge-enabled society.

In India, Government continues to play a major role in inventory and mapping of major national resources and establishing a map information base in the country. Thus, Government has a major stake in managing the spatial information as government agencies are not only the main external providers of spatial information for most operational applications of GIS but also because they exert a profound influence on national developments as a result of "a cocktail of laws, policies, conventions and precedents which determine the availability and price of spatial data". A major challenge over the next decade will be to increase the use of spatially referenced data to support a wide variety of decisions at all levels of society. Using an effective, efficient, and widely accessible infrastructure, spatial data could be readily transported and easily integrated both thematically (e.g., across environmental, economic, and institutional data bases) and hierarchically (e.g., from local to national and eventually to global levels).

Over the past few years, Government and Private agencies have invested considerably in establishing GIS databases. In a way, India has had a strong foundation of a spatial data infrastructure - though mainly analog and paper-map based. Traditionally, the central spatial information infrastructure has been managed as a set of discrete mapping responsibilities within several central agencies.

It is often stated that the major problem in disaster management is not lack of technology or the existence of relevant information, but lack of 'information' about the information. This is especially true for geo-information. Typically, disaster management depends on large volumes of accurate, relevant, on-time geo-information that various organizations systematically create and maintain. Disaster management poses significant challenges for data collection, data management, discovery, translation, integration, visualisation and communication. Effective disaster management requires the thorough use and understanding of the semantics of the heterogeneous (geo-) information sources with their many differences: scale/resolution, dimension (2D or 3D), classification and attributes schemes, temporal aspects (up-to-date-ness, history, predictions of the future), spatial reference system used, etc.

Access to information gathering and organizing technologies like Remote Sensing, GIS and GPS that have proven their usefulness in Disaster Management. With the availability of satellite-based remote sensing data and the organisation of spatial databases around a GIS, combined with the GPS, the process of semantic spatial information systems has now became a reality. The advent of GIS technology has transformed spatial data handling capabilities and made it necessary for re-examining the roles of government with respect to the supply and availability of geographic information. Although Natural disaster cannot be prevented fully, but their impact can be reduced with disaster management strategies aided by latest technological development. One such technology is the Geo-informatics consisting of Remote Sensing, Geographical Information System (GIS), Global Positioning System (GPS) & Information technology (IT) offers a powerful tool for disaster assessment, monitoring managing and risk zonation etc. When a disaster occurs the Geo-information's media are the quickest mode of information collection and can be utilized for monitoring during the event. Remote Sensing & GIS offers a powerful tool to create maps, integrate information, visualize scenarios, solve complicated problems and develop effective solutions in Disaster Management.

Current and accurate spatial data must be readily available to contribute to local, state and national development and contribute to economic growth, environmental quality and stability, and social progress. The nation has, over the past years, produced a rich "base" of map information through systematic topographic surveys, geological surveys, soil surveys, cadastral surveys, various natural resources inventory programmes and the use of the remote sensing images. Further, with the availability of precision, high-resolution satellite images, data enabling the organization of GIS, combined with the Global Positioning System (GPS), the accuracy and information content of these spatial datasets or maps is extremely high. The first steps have been taken but the end-goal is farther away but in sight now. While Government must provide the lead, private enterprise, NGOs and academia have a major role to play in making the National Spatial Data Infrastructure a reality.

In the above context, the establishment of Spatial Data Infrastructure would be the right direction for the country. The SDI must aim to promote and establish an infrastructure, at the national level for the availability of organized spatial (and non-spatial) data and multilevel information networking to contribute to local, national and global needs of sustained economic growth, environmental quality and stability and social progress.

Keeping in view the fact that south Asian region is one of the most disaster prone areas of the world, this International Conference is being organized to bring together subject experts from all over the world, who have already developed space-based, state - of - art technology solutions dealing with the disaster management issues and have demonstrated the utility of spatial data infrastructure in the process. The outcome of the conference will help the policy makers in streamlining the system for use of spatial data infrastructure and its role in Disaster management in South Asian Region for the analysis of hazard, vulnerability and risk, which have immense value in any kind of activities, related to disasters.

Thank You