"Cities in the past were built on riverbanks. They are now built along highways. But in the future, they will be built based on availability of optical fibre networks and next-generation infrastructure.
"Our Government's vision is to build 100 smart cities across the country. And Geospatial Science & Technology (GS&T) is the means to realise this vision," he said, addressing a conference of Geospatial World Forum.
Geo-spatial technology (GST) makes use of satellite navigation systems and computer databases called the Geographical Information System (GIS) to create, capture, store and retrieve geographic and spatial information of any place, he said.
A common thread running between the "path-breaking schemes" initiated by the NDA Government in the urban development sphere, including Smart City Programme, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Urban), Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban), AMRUT and HRIDAY, is the extensive use of ICT and geo-spatial information systems, he said.
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Under the Housing for All (Urban) scheme, the Centre envisioned that individual houses should be tracked through geo-tagged photographs for effective monitoring. The Urban Development Ministry has entered into an MoU with the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Hyderabad for this, he said.
used to precisely locate the authorised and unauthorised garbage dumping sites covering five main routes in Dehradun city, the Minister said.
Formulation of GIS-based Master, Development Plans for 500 AMRUT Cities is one of the important reforms under AMRUT (Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation) launched by the Centre in 2015, Naidu said.
The use of GST-based mapping of cultural and natural heritage assets to increase accessibility and also "intellectual access -- digital heritage and GIS mapping of historical locations" - is central to achieving the main objective of HRIDAY scheme, he added.