Why deregulation of map-making is a big deal for the corporate sector

In geography classes in schools across India, generations of students were often asked to mark out in outline maps sites where coal, oil or iron ore reserves were located. It turns out, at the national level, the diligence of the exercise was hardly different from those crude school maps. In 2016, when the Government of India tried to pinpoint the locations of energy resources, officers found there was no consolidated energy map of India. That is why the government’s decision to deregulate map-making and enable companies to freely map India is such a big deal for corporations.

Constructing maps for any use in India has been a difficult exercise so far. Ask the pioneer companies in the field such as MapmyIndia. The fact that so few companies crop up in this field is due to the difficult licensing requirements to use maps about India, which the government had imposed for everyone. For years, all sorts of companies ranging from IT, energy and delivery services had been lobbying the government to free them from getting permission whenever they needed to show maps about India. One needs location data for a host a reasons, as mundane as reaching food to an apartment to mapping offshore gas and petroleum reserves. L&T Construction used helicopter-based mapping data to save about eight months for the Medigadda barrage, the world’s biggest lift irrigation system, in a Naxal-troubled part of Telangana. It won an award from FICCI for its efforts, recently.

For most companies that need maps for their operations, the options till now was either to buy a licence from the Surveyor General of India or from Isro’s Bhuvan platform (national remote sensing centre) under the department of science and technology or pay a stiff fees to companies such as Google, whenever they wished to use location data. The Survey of India maps are not expensive — about, Rs 2 lakh for a digital map of the entire country for a year’s use — but the paperwork is tedious.

Neither of these were therefore attractive options. Buying Google data each time can cost up to 10 per cent for a company’s bill. Google, too, has to pay for the data it sources from the ring of mostly US satellites circling the globe. Both Ola and Uber, for example, are integrated on the Google Maps database. Because of the integration when you open their ride maps, they use Google location services to show your journey. On the other hand, MapmyIndia offered a limited suite of services because of the costs. Rakesh Verma, CEO of the company, who also chairs the FICCI Committee on geospatial technologies, said the government’s move will boost innovation in the sector and create a level playing field for public and private entities.

He is right because getting a licence from the government was a long-winded task even for government departments. For instance, when the government decided to offer acreages for exploring gas and coal blocks to investors in 2016, it realised there was no consolidated up-to-date energy map of India. Niti Aayog and Isro put their heads together the same year to create such a geospatial energy map. It took four years for the maps to be ready in 2020. The first maps for the Indian segment of the Himalayas at the district level was released by the government just two years ago in December 2018 as a part of a global report on “Climate Vulnerability Assessment”.

MAPPING DEREGULATION

• No requirement for prior approval, security clearance, licence or any other restrictions on the collection, generation, preparation, dissemination, storage, publication, updating and/or digitisation of geospatial data and maps within the territory of India
• Govt will constitute a Geospatial Data Promotion and Development Committee with representations from relevant departments that would decide any issue arising out of a finalisation of negative attributes lists and the regulations proposed on those attributes
• Making a map does not mean someone has a right to physical access including through aerial, territorial, water route to any establishment

It is these sorts of gaps that prompted the government to erase the licensing rules for map-making. While private sector companies would like to believe it is their efforts that have borne fruit—the size of the business could reach Rs 1 trillion by 2030 — the government had other compulsions. For years, there are plans to mine rare minerals in India’s exclusive economic zone offshore. The international rules governing access to high seas are largely codified under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS signed in 1982, to which India is a signatory. It was UNCLOS that brought in the definition of exclusive economic zones.

Enforcement of those exploration rights, however, needs adequate map data. India has come off weaker in many of her claims because it lacked updated data. So most of these claims have not worked because India’s access rights to them like those around the Andaman and Nicobar islands are not clear. The joint Niti Aayog and Isro exercise has identified rich deposits around the Andaman seas and has also identified zones for wind energy off the shores of South India. In the absence of data from India, China has disputed many of these.

Yet Indian satellites have been sending in useful coordinates for the map makers to use but the restrictions on ground have made the data mostly useless, so far. As the Chinese expansion in the South China Sea on the basis of dubious maps prepared in the early half of last century shows, maps are most useful when scouring for resources off the coastlines. With the freedom to draw the lines on paper, the government will be hoping that as companies build a rich vein of geospatial data onshore they shall also provide the same support to the country’s claims in the high seas. A government document notes India will soon launch an ambitious “Deep Ocean Mission” that envisages exploration of minerals, energy and marine diversity of the underwater world, “a vast part of which still remains unexplored”.

“The blue economy in India is where we wish to really work on deeply,” said Ashutosh Sharma, secretary, department of science and technology. This includes deep sea mining including offshore oil and gas. “It is revolutionary as we plan to map of our waters in the oceans, with autonomous vehicles to figure out our assets there,” he added. It is for this reason the government press note says there will be a public negative list of prohibited areas. The only rider is, once the maps are finer than threshold values, like those which can tell with accuracy what lies under the ground or pinpoint camouflaged defence locations, those “shall only be stored and processed on a domestic cloud or on servers physically located within territory of India”. In the process, the newly minted state-owned company, NewSpace India Limited, created under Isro, shall have a rich harvest of business to tap. Obviously a lot rides on the maps.