Google, which has been populating geospatial data in the cyber space for some time, has to follow the law of the land and adhere to the map restriction policy of the country that does not allow detailed maps of defence and sensitive locations to be available in public domain, said Surveyor-General of India Swarna Subba Rao.
The Government of India has specific guidelines laid down with regard to publication of maps in the public domain and all the maps have to be vetted by defence authorities before being published and Google has refused to follow it. As the Surveyor-General who is finally responsible for all the maps of the country he held several meetings with senior officials of the Internet search engine.
The chief cartographer of the nation in an interaction with Navy officers at a talk on Marine Domain Awareness – Survey of India’s Perspective organised by the Visakhapatnam Regional Office of the National Maritime Foundation said that as per the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy, all the government agencies had to share the geospatial data generated by them through the National Geo-spatial Data Centre, he added.
The Survey of India is redefining vertical data of the country and in due course benchmarks like the mean sea level may be corrected in line with the new data. It has the data on mean sea level along the coast for the last 150 years and other such relevant information is shared with the Navy Hydrology Office. The work on building the national reference framework for the purpose of creating an indigenous land based GIS system is going on and it would take time to be completed.
