BHUVAN is a platform developed by the ISRO. It is a well known national geo-portal, which is being widely, used by the Government, public, NGOs and Academia. Bhuvan is developed with a clear focus of addressing Indian requirements of satellite Images and theme-oriented services to enable planning, monitoring and evaluation of stakeholder’s activities in governance and development. Bhuvan provides nation-wide seamless image base, thematic datasets for many natural resources, transport network, Digital Surface Model, hydrologic base from basin to watershed. Bhuvan services include visualisation of remote sensing data (India-centric), free satellite data download, geophysical products, host of thematic services and customised application tools for Government data collaboration and enabling G-governance. It also renders near real-time data and information support towards management of natural disasters in the country.
Significance
- Some of the basic statistics of Bhuvan usage indicates that the portal is gaining importance in the country. In less than 6 years of its existence, it has more than 70,000 registered users; 800 GB of data is transacted per month and it witnesses 60 Million hits per month. About 4.6 lakh satellite data products, including derived products, have been downloaded by users.
- The customised application tools and datasets are being used by more than 30 Central Ministries and about 20 State Governments in various sectors, which include, land & water resources, agriculture, forestry, watershed, urban & infrastructure development, environment, de-centralised planning, asset geo-tagging & mapping, including monitoring of G-governance programmes.
BHUVAN Vs Google Earth
- Bhuvan is designed, developed, deployed and managed by a small team of scientists within ISRO. It primarily focuses on societal-benefits and is not a commercial venture. On the contrary, Google Earth is a commercial enterprise with a large investment & large resource base an
- d makes a huge business through advertisements and products.
- Google has a definite business model (in positioning & maintaining very high resolution satellite images) that is directly dealt with satellite operators/ services providers. The business model that is being operated is not in the public domain.
- Google Earth does provide very high to high resolution remote sensing data (World-wide) for visualisation with advanced value added services, but does not provide India specific seamless multi-thematic GIS data sets, free satellite data downloads and customised application tools for government data collaboration.
Thus, Bhuvan and Google Earth are two different platforms developed for different purposes and objectives.
