The National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Hyderabad, one of the centres of the Indian Space Organisation (ISRO), is going to prepare a fluoride map on Nalgonda district soon to make the job of the people working on the project easier.
During his visit to the district, senior scientist of NRSC, I.C. Das, told The Hindu the idea was to help the government organisations, NGOs and others working on the fluoride issue. Mr. Das said that they would show each and every habitation on the map with details such as demography, drinking water and irrigation sources, fluoride level in groundwater, progress of projects initiated by governments and NGOs, number of people suffering from different kinds of fluorosis, etc. People would get the required information within minutes by going through the map on their computers from any part of the world .
Mr. Das said they have sought the required statistics from District Fluoride Mitigation Centre (DFMC) to prepare the map. Once they received the information they would start preparing the map, which would also made available online.
Speaking to The Hindu , Deputy Director of National Institute of Nutrition (NIN), Arjun L Kandhare, who has been working on the fluoride issue, said the initiative would make the job of all those people working on the issue easy. “Because earlier no such information was available, we used spend number hours and days.” Mr. Kandhare said the map would help them reach any highly fluoride-affected remote area within a day and get down to work without losing time.
