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Union Minister for Rural Development and Panchayati Raj Giriraj Singh on February 22 released Rural Connectivity GIS Data in Public Domain. This includes GIS data for 800,000+ rural facilities as points, over 1 million habitations and over 25,00,000 km of rural roads which have been collected and digitised using the GIS platform developed for the PMGSY scheme. Union Minister of State for Rural Development Faggan Singh Kulaste and Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti were also present on the occasion.

NRIDA, the nodal implementation agency of the PMGSY scheme signed MoU with 3 renowned GIS Firms ESRI India, MapmyIndia, DataMeet & collaborated with Gati Shakti for releasing the Rural Connectivity GIS Data in Public Domain.

Giriraj Singh recalled that since the inception of the PMGSY scheme, more than 6.90 lakh km of roads have been constructed connecting 1,61,508 habitations with an expenditure of 2.69 lakh crores. The pace of construction of rural roads under PMGSY has seen massive growth during the last seven years and emphasis has been given to new technology resulting in a saving of about Rs 5000 crores. The Minister informed that the data made available in the public domain can be beneficial to the startups, entrepreneurs, businesses, civil society, academics and other government departments to build products, conduct research, plan investments, improve service delivery and quick disaster response. The Minister recalled the Prime Minister’s vision of “AtmaNirbhar Bharat” and said that it can be achieved only by developing rural India by use of rural infrastructure data now available with the government.

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N N Sinha, Secretary (RD) informed that the rural infrastructure GIS data will help in bridging the gap between urban and rural India and transform India into Atmanirbhar Bharat. He also envisioned that the drones can be utilized for the delivery of essential commodities such as vaccines once all the addresses are digitized on the portal.

Dr Ashish Kumar Goel, AS (RD) & DG, NRIDA in the keynote address informed PMGSY scheme has played a massive role in the development of rural India and the PMGSY logo has become a symbol of quality and sustainability. He informed that under new technology, more than 1,00,000 km of roads have been sanctioned till date and under PMGSY-III, 50% of the roads have been sanctioned under new/green technology. For sanctioning, execution, maintenance and complaint redressal of these roads, NRIDA has made use of IT assets such as OMMAS, GEOSADAK, GePNIC, eMARG and MeriSadak. DG NRIDA emphasized that the MoU signed with the three partners on GIS data can be used in the business application for the benefit of the nation as a whole. He also informed that the Ministry will be shortly launching a hackathon with the help of the DataMeet organization where the use of data released on February 22 can be used for the data visualization, policy research and other products with the overall objective of improving rural economy and ease of living.

The launch of GIS data was followed by a technical session where presentations were made by ESRI India, MapmyIndia, DataMeet, Gati Shakti and CDAC Pune.

(With inputs from PIB)

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