Your geography, your maps

While Google Maps and WikiMapia stay mostly restricted to urban centres, the Open Street Map project has decided to give voice and direction to rural areas. You can join the movement too. All you need is a GPS navigator and some spare time

Think Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), the autonomous body under the umbrella of the Department of Atomic Energy of the Government of India, and what springs up is the image of a bunch of fuddy duddies poring over thick, yellowing books. You couldn't be further from the truth.

The Gnowledge Lab at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBSCE) in collaboration with Digital Bridge Foundation, is spearheading one of Mumbai's coolest collective projectsu00a0-- using self-made GPS navigators and free and open source software to map nine villages in Raigarh district of Maharashtra by December, hoping to inspire others to replicate the movement across the country.

The mapping team reached the Borgao School, a landmark in the village

Nagarjuna G, professor at HBSCE, TIFR, is one of the forces behind the project. "The Gnowledge Lab works on education-based projects. Rural street mapping is one of them. People learn geography from a book.

We wanted to create activity-based learning, and have people get out to map their own village and area," he says. The movement took off when after working in villages of Maharashtra, as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC Project) for one year, Nagarjuna realised that while most major roads are already mapped on Google Maps, the villages had no representation.

Every Saturday, he and a group of volunteers from Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI) and the Smt. Indira Gandhi Centre for Engineering in Koparkhairne head out to Raigarh in the wee hours with custom-made GPS navigators.

"Weu00a0 collect trails, positions and tracks. The GPS gives us the coordinates of the area. Then, a file containing the entire path that you have walked on is created and saved before it's uploaded on to www.openstreetmap.org."

VK Bharadwaj, Nagarjuna G, Amit Dhakulkar, and Rafik mark the map near MorbeDam, in front of a lake that provides drinking water to Navi Mumbai

The updated map will eventually be presented to the District Collector of Raigarh to seek more support to complete mapping the rest of the district.

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Post production work includes using a special map-editing software called Josm, that helps layer tracks on a background vector drawing. "Following this, details like landmarks and hospitals are added." The best part? Since it's collaborative, you can upload your file and leave it there for someone else to edit, and vice versa.

Next on the agenda is to give these unknown villages a Wikipedia page. "As we go about collecting GPS data for the Open Street Map project, we also interview residents of the village and collect demographical information for the Wikipedia page," Nagarjuna shares.

He sees this as a social education project. "We send geo-special satellites in space to broadcast positions, timestamp and latitudes of places across the country. But that information isn't ever made public. We are undertaking this as a sort of protest to get the government to realise that information such as this deserves to be in the public domain, and because it is not, we are doing it voluntarily."

Fast Fact
CommerCial GPS navigators cost between Rs 10,000 and Rs 15,000, but don't receive 32 channels that those manufactured locally by Spark Systems do

Debuts In: December 2010