The Hindu Business Line : Bhuvan readies for new vistas

Eventually, it may have a commercial component but for now, the service offers data on agriculture, disaster, natural resources, climate and watershed development and the developmental, societal input is unique on such a service, said Dr V. Jayaraman, Director of the National Remote Sensing Centre, an ISRO arm.

The beta status may remain for another three or four months.

“Bhuvan may finally also reach mobile users, who are asking for navigational features. People now want high resolution images and want to add content from their side. The beta site is addressing these issues,” Dr Jayaraman told Business Line.

The site got over 2.2 lakh registrations since it was unveiled at a scientific conclave in Delhi on August 12. “The Bhuvan site has been getting 1,000 hits (registrations) an hour from 70 countries,” Dr Jayaraman said. “We have been constantly fine-tuning the site, making the entry processes smoother and adding new features based on the feedback we get.”

Teething troubles

Admittedly there are many teething troubles. The registration and login, which will stay, were slow; the user bandwidth is low and downloading the plug-in is a problem for many.

The 20-member Bhuvan team has been making the processes easier; adding applications such as daily weather and increasing the bandwidth (now at 200 mbps). “There were complaints on the use of proprietary software (Internet Explorer 6.0). Now it should be available on Mozilla Firefox, Netscape and also on open source.”

Bhuvan, meaning Earth in Sanskrit, offers India data in 2D and 3D from the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellites — mainly two Cartosats and Resourcesat-1 — orbiting at a distance of some 900 km.

“You can see the entire country mosaic at 5.8 metres (put simply, any object of this size) — a feature that beats all others (for Indian areas). It gives a 1:3000 scale for maps where the minimum required is 1:50,000.” However, 5.8 m is the maximum resolution now allowed under the Indian remote-sensing policy, though ISRO has even sub-metre capability through Cartosat-2A – and which is given to commercial and government users in special cases.

Bhuvan was put together in the last six months by a team pooled in from ISRO centres, the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Dehra Dun, and the Regional Remote Sensing Service Centres at the State level.

Dr Jayaraman said it showcases ISRO’s capability and caters to rural India, while the available service has been urban centric and village views were only of 30 m resolution.

“We are unique and different. The comparison with Google Earth is unfair. We are not competing with any other information portal,” he said.