Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

India’s space agency Indian Space Research Organisation joined hands with Indian firm MapmyIndia to develop India specific location-based and mapping services, which can be used as an alternative to Google Maps.

MapmyIndia CEO Rohan Verma took to his LinkedIn profile shared this collaboration. He called this a “path-breaking milestone in India’s journey towards Atma Nirbhar Bharat”. He believes that Indians are better off with an indigenous solution to maps and geospatial services and do not need to depend on foreign firms.

MapmyIndia started mapping services in India in 1995, way before any foreign player came into the picture. MapmyIndia claims to display the true sovereignty of India and is according to the government of India. The Indian map created by the Indian firm, covering 7.5 lakh villages and 7500+ cities, was created entirely indigenously and for over the last 25 years, far before any foreign company started offering maps in India.

Verma claims MapmyIndia to be against an advertising-based business model and intended to offer ad-free mapping services to Indian users.

ISRO can be considered as the crown jewel of India when it comes to space and satellite technologies. ISRO has a constellation of satellites in space that provides chunks of data consisting of satellite imagery and earth observation.

With this alliance, MapmyIndia intends to use ISRO’s huge catalog of satellite imagery and earth observatory data and integrate them with their end-user maps, apps, and geospatial services, making them more detailed and comprehensive thereby providing a hyper-local, privacy-centric, and indigenous mapping solution to the Indians.

MapmyIndia claims that users will be able to see all of India from a bird’s eye point of view, along with various insights and analytics about pollution, weather, agricultural output, real-time traffic, floods, landslides, and many more.

The collaboration will also help ISRO to develop the NavIC(Navigation with Indian constellation), Web Services, VEDAS (Visualisation of Earth observation Data and Archival System), and MOSDAC (Meteorological and Oceanographic Satellite Data Archival Center) geoportals, etc.

Last year government of India had invited private firms in India to invest and explore space and satellite technologies and had set up an organization, called Indian National Space Promotions and Authorisation Centre(INSPACe). Following this, ISRO has entered into partnerships with private firms.

The government, last year, had stressed the fact that the ever-increasing demand for space-based data and all data available with ISRO is not utilized properly. The government intends to offer private firms to use the facilities in ISRO to launch satellites for now and offers help to develop their launch platforms.

ISRO mentioned that as many as 28 private firms are in talks with INSPACe. Some of them are building their rockets and satellites, some are developing space and web-based services and applications and some are hoping to offer launch services.

Enhancing private participation in the space industry has been the main theme of ISRO chairman K Sivan’s new year speech. ISRO’s alliance with private players will reduce the load on ISRO’s head to process and publish all the geospatial data collected and also increases the applications of these data.

He also mentioned young entrepreneurs are coming forward to develop end-toe-end launch vehicles and other space-based services. Participation of private firms can also help to boost the economy along with creating new job opportunities for the Indian youth.