Urban Spatial Data Centre

Rajasthan’s Urban Data Centre is a unique initiative in the country. Creating a Spatial Data Centre under Rajasthan Urban Information Systems was identified very early on as one of the Reform Track Projects under the State Urban Agenda for Rajasthan (SUARAJ) initiative, based on the suggestions of Swati Ramanathan, Advisor, SUARAJ. In the meeting that took place in June 2005 in Jaipur, representatives from the key departments agreed that reliable and current spatial data was a key requirement in the process of decision-making.

As in every other state in the country, government departments in Rajasthan too rarely utilized the power of spatial data in any meaningful manner, either in planning or management. An analysis by the SUARAJ advisor of the departments that were using spatial data – Jaipur Development Authority, Rajasthan Urban Infrastructure Development Planning, Jaipur Municipal Authority – the use was very limited and project based; the quality of the data was poor and each department used their own resources and infrastructure to produce new sets of the same base data.

This analysis highlighted three issues:

• Inefficient use of resources
• Inconsistent data
• Inability to merge datasets of differing scales and standards

SUARAJ introduced setting up a six-city project that would do the following:

1. Create a central repository of spatial data that all agencies would use
2. Do this for the six key cities and their immediate areas in Rajasthan
3. Set data standards and scales
4. Specify the data requirements for two needs: Planning and Urban Management
5. Open it up to the market players of GIS for the first time diverging from the practice of giving the task to government agencies, with the intent of accessing the best talent
6. Create a state-of-the-art procurement document that specifies the hardware, applications and technical scope of the project and ensure bids with minimum interpretive variance between bids

Under SUARAJ, an intelligent procurement document for putting in place such an urban Spatial Information System was carefully crafted. This procurement document specific the hardware, applications and technical scope of the project and ensured bids with minimum interpretive variance between bids. The procurement document should now become the template that is used for all remaining cities and towns in Rajasthan. Government of Rajasthan is now on its way to providing one of the best spatial and GIS support systems for its cities.