Hon’ble Minister of State, PMO, Dr Jitendra Singh, inaugurated a National Workshop on “Space-based Information Support for Decentralised Planning-2”, a unique initiative that plans to provide satellite image based scientific information for Gram Panchayat development in the country. This new initiative is jointly taken up by Ministry of Gram Panchayat and Department of Space, ISRO to reach out to the nuke and corner of the country, touching every village panchayat across the nation. While Hon’ble Minister of State PMO, who was the chief guest on the occasion, released the “Bhuvan-Panchayat” Geoportal, Technical documents of this new initiative and delivered a key-note address, Shri Sunil Kumar, Secretary, Ministry of Panchayati Raj, Dr K Sivan, Secretary, Department of Space & Chairman, ISRO and Shri R Umamaheswaran, Scientific secretary, ISRO delivered special address on the occasion. The workshop had the participation of States / UTs, State Remote Sensing Application Centers across the country, Senior dignitaries of Ministry of Panchayati Raj, State Rural & Panchayat Development Departments, Senior officers of NIC, NITI Aayog, Scientists of DOS/ISRO and many other senior Government officials of the States.

The workshop laid special emphasis on the 73rd and 74th constitution amendments of 1993 which has a focus towards decentralization of planning to better help in the local governance at village panchayat level. The initiative is taken up with a clear focus on addressing the grass-roots with regard to scientific inputs for planning and development, so that the Panchayat Raj institutions could effectively use space technology for planning, implementation, monitoring and management of resources, including governance.

The workshop addressed modalities and mechanisms that would be adopted to empower the local bodies in utilizing the space technology in the form of simple-to-use maps, location based services through NavIC and high resolution space images based local tools to enable the panchayats with modern technology for sustainable development. The workshop was specially meant for providing base data and satellite images for all the State Governments, who would partner with DOS and MOPR, not only in geospatial database preparation, but also help in reaching out to the grass-roots in enabling these technologies to be effectively used in their respective States. Considering the importance of such an initiative, DOS/ISRO has already developed a digital map dissemination platform in the form of “Bhuvan-Panchayat” geoportal (released by Hon’ble MOS,PMO on the occasion), which will be used as the medium to reach out to village panchayats and would also prove to be an important component for “Digital India” platform for reaching digital thematic maps to about 2.56 Lakh Gram panchayats in the country. This would help in addressing development and management of Land & Water Resources, parameters related to socio-economic, primary health & education and hence enable the path towards improvement of quality of life in the rural areas. This would also help the local governments in prudent planning, systematic funding, proper implementation and periodic monitoring for effective local area development, in rural India.