Nagaland chief minister T.R. Zeliang has said that use of space technology based tools and applications would give boost and encouragement to various departments of the state government in day to day governance as well as in delivery of public utility services and development to the people of the state.
Zeliang said this at the closing function of state level meet on promoting use of space technology and applications in governance and development as chief guest held at capital convention center Kohima on Wednesday.
The meet was organized by the Nagaland GIS and Remote Sensing Centre jointly with the Indian Space research organization (ISRO) and North Eastern Space Application Centre (NESAC).
Appreciating the responsible department, chief minister said Nagaland has made much progress in various space technology applications such as GIS, Remote sensing, Photogrammetry, and Location Based Services (LBS), state wide GIS & IT based projects in the field of health, education, disaster management, vehicle tracking, e-learning, 3D Terrain Modeling, natural resource & land use mappings, weather reports and forecasting etc, which were being carried out in collaboration with various National Organizations.
Zeliang said at present the storage of many important data and information, including books and libraries were being shifted to the clouds for easy accessibility to internet.
He reminded that now the internet was one of the most essential services, which could greatly improve and expanded through increasing use of space technology and satellite.
“Now, physical distances, remoteness of geographical locations, and poor physical connectivity etc can be overcome to a large extent through internet,” chief minister said.
He opined that the geographical isolation and remoteness of the North East region would soon become a thing of the past through better development and use of space technology.
Director NESAC/ISRO, department of space, P L N Raju, speaking on “strategies and way forward” said the major thrust areas of Nagaland by using space technology were assets and resources/utility mapping, large scale mapping and GIS planning, health GIS, disaster risk reduction (DRR) activities, crop acreage estimation and multi-crop planning, soil health card, aqua farming etc, capacity building and R&D activities.
Presentation salient outcome of the thematic session, additional chief secretary and development commissioner R B Thong said a document containing all the concept notes/proposals totaling approximately Rs.120 crores was prepared for submission to the government of India for examination and consideration.
Speaking on reflection of the meet, parliamentary secretary planning & coordination, evaluation and taxes, Neiba Kronu said that space technology application has become a necessity.
He said accuracy of all forms of data collected for planning and governance, services of Geospatial Information System (GIS) centre was highly required.
Besides providing better health and education in the remote areas, he said space services could be used for checking crime. He also said efforts must begin by increasing the awareness of the benefits of space technology towards the benefit of the people.
He also maintained that the state government has been trying to bring in investors for various development activities but they have a second thought after receiving the manually provided data.
The closing function was chaired by chief secretary Pankaj Kumar and project director NGISRSC Er. Kithan proposed vote of thanks.
Leave a Reply