GIS technology to strengthen Namami Gange Programme

• National Mission for Clean Ganga has brought on board Survey of India, the oldest scientific department in the country set up in 1767, to facilitate the Ganga rejuvenation task by using Geographic Information System (GIS) technology.
• Through the project which has been approved in the EC meeting at an estimated cost of Rs. 86.84 crore, NMCG aims to strengthen planning and implementation at national/state/local levels.
• The project includes use of Digital Elevation Model (DEM) technology which ensures accurate data collection, an important aspect for river basin management planning.
• DEM technology enables identification of entire topography of an area making it easy for policy makers to analyse the available data thereby supporting the decision-making process.
• Critical hotspots are also easily identified through this technology.
• The use of GIS technology for Namami Gange programme will also ensure decentralisation. The data collected and subsequent actions taken by the government can easily be shared with the local public through geo portals and mobile apps. The technology will also enable people to send their feedback up to the national level thereby providing an interactive and transparent platform.
• For effective discharge management, outlet of sewerage and other discharges from all units - industrial, commercial and all types of other institutions will be mapped from the source outlet to the public drainage network.
• In addition, the high resolution GIS enabled data will help in regulating the proposed protected and regulatory zones along the banks of river.

• A geographic information system (GIS) is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial or geographic data. The acronym GIS is sometimes used for geographic information science (GIScience) to refer to the academic discipline that studies geographic information systems and is a large domain within the broader academic discipline of geoinformatics. What goes beyond a GIS is a spatial data infrastructure, a concept that has no such restrictive boundaries.
• In general, the term describes any information system that integrates, stores, edits, analyzes, shares, and displays geographic information. GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries (user-created searches), analyze spatial information, edit data in maps, and present the results of all these operations. Geographic information science is the science underlying geographic concepts, applications, and systems.
• GIS can refer to a number of different technologies, processes, and methods. It is attached to many operations and has many applications related to engineering, planning, management, transport/logistics, insurance, telecommunications, and business. For that reason, GIS and location intelligence applications can be the foundation for many location-enabled services that rely on analysis and visualization.
• GIS can relate unrelated information by using location as the key index variable. Locations or extents in the Earth space–time may be recorded as dates/times of occurrence, and x, y, and z coordinates representing, longitude, latitude, and elevation, respectively. All Earth-based spatial–temporal location and extent references should be relatable to one another and ultimately to a "real" physical location or extent. This key characteristic of GIS has begun to open new avenues of scientific inquiry.