School children map their neighbourhood in Uttaranchal State

Sometime back, I had suggested a way of tapping school/college students to create local information resources. It turns out that the Department of Science & Technology has initiated a project in schools to get school children to map local neighbourhoods.

Yahoo India carried a story (October 04, 2004) which describes an effort by a group of over 250 school children in Uttaranchal State as part of the Mapping the Neighbourhood Project sponsored by the Department of Science & Technology. The project is being co-ordinated by the Centre for Spatial Database Management and Solutions. According to the Yahoo report,

A group of 18 children, between 13 and 18 years of age, showed Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal here 20-odd maps of their region sketched with complex altimeters that could be used for development purposes. The maps gave information of the villages, including the occupation of the people, the male-female ratio, water availability and electricity supply.

Maulik Kandpal, a class seven student, presented a map on the natural springs near the township of Almora. "From our analysis, we have found that while some women have to walk just half a kilometre in search of water, there are others for whom water is more than 10 km away." Information is downloaded from the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite and interpreted to locate minute details like garbage bins, electric poles, the number of streetlights and even the number of steps. Sunil Gaur, of the Centre for Spatial Database Management and Solutions - the NGO that trained the children - said they were taught to collect and analyse the information. "After that they were left on their own to make their studies and chart them out."

Fourteen-year-old Dhananjay Mehta, who went around his town while conducting the survey and talking to people about their problems, said the exercise had helped him "understand the problems faced by our state." "This will definitely help us help our village," he said. While a map of Chitai village showed that there were more women than men, tracking the garbage pick-up truck's route in Matena showed the exact locations where the garbage bins were ignored, Dhananjay explained.

V.S. Ramamoorthy, secretary of DST, told IANS: "The mapping system in India has often been criticised for being inaccurate and outdated. Now that the project has shown its results, it is up to the government to implement this system of mapping into the national mode." A visibly impressed minister said: "This mapping is the kind of data we want to put on board for development process.

If the activities involved in mapping the neighbourhood are integrated into the school/college curriculum, the scope of the Mapping the Neighbourhood Project which currently focusses largely on geography, could be expanded to also cover local history, biology and ecology, economy and business, media, health and other issues too.

If every neighbourhood in the country is able to create a local resource of this sort, and all the local resources can be integrated together into a national database, we would have a storehouse of information of phenomenal value to the individuals, businesses, government bodies and NGOs.The students will also be learning valuable skills as part of the process of creating the local resources.

Another important aspect of the project is the potential it has to generate some revenues for the schools/colleges to which the students belong if local businesses and the government bodies see value in the information and insights generated by the students and are willing to pay for it. The students could even undertake customised studies/surveys on request. One such idea could be implemented at the college level to generate revenues for colleges.

Frederick Noronha has more to say on the need to create local content, its relevance and the kinds of local content that can be generated.