Smart in Space...Clueless on Land
As India's capabilities in the field of space technologies increase continuously, the gap between the data generated by our space based assets and the utilisation of the same for solving pressing social and economic problems is felt palpably...and painfully.
After all, the vision of our space program has always been to -
"Harness, sustain and augment space technology for national development, while pursuing space science research and planetary exploration."
And this is the level that we have already reached in this domain -
When it comes to space, we are not just good - we are among the best in the world and sometimes better.
The Indian satellite cartosat-3, launched in November 2019, is one of the most advanced high-resolution earth observation satellites in the world.
With a resolution of 25 cm, Cartosat-3 surpasses the American World View-3 satellite owned by Maxar Technologies, which has a resolution of 31 cm.
And guess what is written in the Mission document of Cartosat-3 as the primary application of this third generation satellite -
You can access the document on this link.
One would expect that such high resolution products would be developed for the defense sector alone, but we have reached a level of technological development, where the mission document lists purely civilian sectors as the target users of Cartosat-3.
I seriously wonder whether the scores of professionals of India's urban development sector are aware that one of the most advanced products of one of the most advanced fields of human technology has been produced by their country for them.
Is it really so hard to imagine, what all becomes possible when you have high resolution satellite data available for the whole city and the region ?
From data collection to serious data analysis
With the development of advanced earth observation satellites we can finally take a pause from the gigantic spatial survey exercises that take up all the energy and creativity that could and should be dedicated to data analysis, forecasting, modelling etc. In any case, the fragmented and project specific data generated by these large urban development projects is used poorly and then abandoned and forgotten the moment the projects come to an end (refer to previous blogs for more details).
Consider the fact that Jaga Mission - which created one of the largest high-resolution geo-spatial database of urban slums in the world, had to deploy three separate drone survey companies, multiple quadcopter drones, teams of surveyors and the resources of over a hundred city governments to complete that survey in less than a year.
Given the logistics of covering almost 2000 slums in 109 small and medium cities spread across the length and breadth of the state of Odisha, which has an area of 155,000 square kilometres, it was a daunting task. Typically, in large urban development projects in India (and they are all large nowadays), so much energy and resources are devoted to conduct the surveys and create the datasets that serious analysis never gets a chance to take off.
Such a daunting logistics would also imply, that while the urban reality is extremely dynamic, the probability of repeating such a spatial survey exercise at regular intervals would be very low.
From the point of view of temporal change, the ultra-high resolution data collected under Jaga Mission in 2018 may already be out of date. And there exist no plans of updating that data set.
Satellite data has no such problem with temporal resolution (the interval of time after which the same area of the surface of the earth would be captured again by the satellite in orbit).
With Cartosat-3 data, one can not only get a detailed picture of slum settlements (not just in Odisha, but through the country), but one can also analyse the spatial changes over time and also relate the location of slums to other features in the city (none of these are possible with Jaga Mission drone data, which only captured images of individual slum settlements.
Data without scientific knowledge is useless
There is a never-ending clamour for data among urban development professionals and researchers in India...a tendency I described as "data hunting-gathering" in a previous blog. However, it was not access to unlimited amounts of data that made the Indian space program what it is today - but scientific knowledge and the intelligent application of that knowledge.
Data is crucial - but only when one possesses the necessary scientific knowledge to effectively use that data.
The trouble is that many (definitely not all) professionals demanding access to all kinds of digital data - i) would not be able to recognise that data if it were staring at them from their computer screens; ii) would not know what to do with the data even if by some miracle they figured out that it was indeed the data that they were looking for.
The usual excuse given by scholars and practitioners alike is that urban challenges are too complex. Of course, they are complex - but complexity of a problem is as much a function of the knowledge of the problem-solver as it is an intrinsic characteristic of the problem itself.
Finding an address too can be a very complex task - if someone doesn't know how to read a map.
It is always nice to check whether a problem is really complex or if I am too dumb ! It may be very nice to discover that it is the latter, because then I know that the problem is solvable and I also get an opportunity to study and learn something new and useful.
Unless that knowledge gap is bridged, the brilliant developments in the field of Indian space technologies shall be unable to solve the relatively mundane challenges of urban planning and development.
And that would be a real shame.
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