Geo Tagging
- It is the process of adding geographical identification like latitude and longitude to various media such as a photo or video.
- Geotagging can help users find a wide variety of location-specific information from a device.
- It provides users the location of the content of a given picture.
- Geomapping is a visual representation of the geographical location of geotagged assets layered on top of map or satellite imagery
Why is Geotagging important?
- Several assets are created in the states under various schemes of the Ministry of Agriculture. Under Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY) also, states have been utilising substantial amount of funds for creation of infrastructure/assets in agriculture and allied sectors such as soil testing labs, pesticide testing labs, bio fertiliser setting units, custom hiring centres, vaccine production units, veterinary diagnosis labs., dispensaries, milk collection centres, fish production units, godowns, cold storage, shade nets, pandals for vegetable cultivation etc. Monitoring of such wide spread activities is of paramount importance to states and Government of India to understand flow of funds, inventorising the assets, bringing in transparency, planning of assets for future, and finally informing the farmers about the facilities available.
- Geotagging for monitoring of assets has already started in Ministry of Rural Development for MGNREGA and Department of Land Resources for monitoring of watershed activities in the states. Postal department has also geotagged the post offices using NRSC Bhuvan Platform.
Which agency does it?
National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA), ISRO at Hyderabad. This centre of ISRO has a software platform, Bhuvan that allows users to explore a 2D/3D representation of the surface of the Earth. It also acts as a platform for hosting government data.
Application
- The assets created under RKVY could be monitored by Geotagging them using BHUVAN. In future, the location of the infrastructure created and distances from each other could also be utilised for arriving at distribution of assets and optimum number of that particular asset required in a district or state. The process involves development of a mobile app for mapping the assets through photographs and Geo-tagging (providing geo co-ordinates) before hosting on to DAC –RKVY platform that would be specially created for RKVY monitoring.
- Geo-tagging exercise is a national level initiative involving linking ISRO-Bhuvan with "NREGA-Soft" interface operated under DoRD by National Informatics Centre (NIC). This has to be established within a very limited time-line, which will enable access to all state implementing departments. Database of completed assets residing on "NREGA-Soft" will be pushed to Bhuvan, which in turn will be served to each data collector under Gram Panchayats. Collected data will be moderated for quality level through approved authorities at block level to ensure the precise information for online visualization. Bhuvan can facilitate a complete geographic information storage, retrieval, analysis and reporting for completed assets, with a high resolution backdrop of Indian Remote sensing Satellite (IRS) natural color images.
