Budget 2023: Geospatial policy needs to be backed with investment, says Esri India's MD Agendra Kumar

Esri India UC 2023 Conference in India: Tech company Esri India has launched Policy Maps to facilitate Centre, state governments, enterprises and institutes in data-driven policymaking. The feature has been designed to provide meaningful insights for various government functions with a special focus on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Talking on the sidelines of Esri India UC 2023, Agendra Kumar, Managing Director, Esri India, said that geospatial is doing very well and the company is expecting a growth of 20 per cent in terms of revenue.

The Ministry of Science and Technology notified the National Geospatial Policy, 2022 in December last year with the aim to promote the geospatial data industry of India and develop a national framework to use such data for improving citizen services, and more.

Expectations from Budget 2023

While Agendra Kumar feels that the geospatial policy is excellent, he is of the view that it needs to be backed with certain investments. He said that the expectation from the upcoming Budget-2023 will be the allocation of more funds for the creation of geospatial data. 

"We have a very elaborate geospatial policy. But it needs to be backed with certain investment by the government. So, I do hope that they (Centre) will allocate money for various government departments for data creation. The policy has a lot of focus on the creation of new data sets but it will be something very difficult unless money is allocated by the government. So the major expectation is that in terms of capital funding, money goes to different ministries and departments for the creation of geospatial data," Kumar told Zee Business. 

Challenges faced by this sector

The challenge this sector, especially the service company, faces is that many user departments do not have sufficient knowledge to create appropriate RFPs and set the criteria for evaluation and expectations. 

"So if some efforts can be done, even if it is done through private-public partnership, in terms of educating the user departments more so that when they come out with the RFPs they articulate their requirements well and define their acceptance criteria well.....In nutshell, education at the user level is important," he added.