Putting people on the map

HED (Google MAPATHON)

Governments decision to invoke coercive restrictions in response to Googles Mapathon contest
has shown its inability to respond to technological innovations and public needs in a fast changing
world
Last week, the Survey of India (SOI), the mapping arm of the government, filed a police
complaint against Googles Mapathon the first ever mapping competition in India. It alleged
that Google, which had invited Indian participants to add their local knowledge to existing maps,
is likely to jeopardise national security interest and violate the National Map Policy. It also
threatened participants with potential breach of rules. In response, Google has stood its ground
and said its activities are well within the rules.
At the heart of this conflict are not legal issues as the SOI makes it out to be, but the shrinking
role of the state in disseminating geographical information. Technologies have broken
government monopoly over spatial data and are empowering communities to produce maps that
are relevant to them. Bewildered government institutions, instead of embracing innovation and
quickly adjusting to changes, are seeking the coercive power of rules to maintain dominance
and stifle innovation.
For more than two centuries, the SOI has been surveying the country and producing
topographical and special maps of different scales. Of the two kinds of maps it publishes,
Defence Series and Open Series Maps, the second are declared as unrestricted by the Ministry of
Defence. These are the maps that can be sold to the public. Third parties can reprint and add
value to them, but only after signing an agreement and abiding by the condition set by the SOI.
However, maps of coastal areas, the region around national boundaries and of Jammu & Kashmir
State are out of bounds.
These restrictions are inconsequential. Private companies sell satellite images and maps of
Indian territories for a fee. For example, RapidEye, a private company based in Germany,
offers high resolution images of three billion square kilometres of earth area including
images of the western boundary of Jammu and Kashmir.
Technology, as two geographers, Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier insightfully noted, is
pushing cartography out of the control of powerful elites. Maps worldwide are accessible as
never before.
Probably, anticipating such a situation, in 2005, the Indian National Map Policy envisioned that
the SOI would take a leadership role in liberalising access to spatial data. To promote this, the
national policy recommended exploration of partnerships with all sections of people and work
towards a knowledge-based society. But nothing much has changed. We are yet to witness
collaborative efforts in the scale and manner needed.
On the contrary, Google Maps and Google Earth, launched in the same year as the National Map
Policy, have taken advantage of technological solutions and allowed users to freely populate
maps with information relevant to them.
Counter-mapping, a practice and term made popular by Nancy Lee Peluso, a political ecologist,
has challenged such state dominance and indifference. For more than a decade, it has
empowered communities to produce alternative maps that document local assets and enabled
them to make rightful claims.
From Indonesia to Nicaragua, these counter-maps groups have challenged exploitation,
exclusion, and demanded democratic resource allocation.
Closer home, Transparent Chennai, a project initiated by Institute for Financial Management and
Research and partly funded by Googles Inform and Empower initiative, helps Chennai citizens
counter inaccurate government data.
By collecting information such as location of public toilets and mapping them, local communities
evaluate government performance and demand better services.
Not everything is benign about mapping practices offered by Google.
Commercial exploitation of data, invasion of privacy and illegal scooping of personal information
in Google projects such as Street View are unsettling. Oliver Burkeman, writing in The Sydney
Morning Herald on the dark side of digital mapping, remarked that Googles and Apples maps
might not just observe our lives, but in some sense come to play a role in directing their
course.

They track use patterns, manipulate data and produce maps that stealthily serve commercial
interests. Burkeman wittily observed that our search for the quickest route between two points
in such map services may throw a result that passes through at least one Starbucks shop.
One of the models worth looking at is New Yorks open data policy and the related BigApps
project. The city has made it mandatory for government agencies to disclose data to improve
transparency and governance. Since 2009, New York has been conducting competitions, which
encourage people to use these data and create useful applications. Digital map applications are
frequently among the prize winning ones. For example, last years prize winning entry, 596
Acres, is an online map application that helps communities find vacant public land and put it to
common use.
Unfettered use of data and free mapping possibilities alone have the potential to check
predatory practices and state monopoly.

Like vegetable for oil

HED (guar gum)
stand-off, triggered by the farmers decision to hold on to their guar crop in anticipation of
higher prices, has brought Jodhpurs guar trading and processing market, responsible for 40 per
cent of the global guar gum supply, to a halt.
Humble guar or cluster bean (Cyamopsis tetragonoloba) is an annual legume and the
source of guar gum. Once deemed fit only for cattle feed, it has now made terms like futures
trading, National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange (NCDEX) and Forward Markets
Commission (FMC) household names in Rajasthan over the last three years.
Its use
Guar gum, a white free-flowing powder derived from guar splits, is widely used by the global
oil and gas industry for fracking, a hydraulic fracturing technique.
Due its unique binding properties the ability to suspend solids, bind water by
hydrogen bonding, control the viscosity of aqueous solutions and form strong tough
films guar gum is mixed with water and sand to frack shale gas out of
sedimentary shale rock formations.
Owing to unprecedented demand from the United States, China, Germany, Russia and Australia
(top five importers), everyone in western Rajasthan with a few bighas to spare decided to jump
on the guar bandwagon, forgoing even cash crops like cotton to grow more guar.
Exports of guar gum from India, which stood at 2,18,479.71 metric tonnes in 2009-10, rose 223
per cent to reach 7,07,326.43 MTs in 2011-12.
While guar is grown in arid and semi-arid regions of most of northern India, including
Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana and Punjab, its processing and trading
are almost exclusively confined to Jodhpur.
Extremely low input costs, good productivity, longer shelf life and the fact that it restores soil
fertility mean guar is always a profitable proposition. So unless you get really greedy, selling it is
not a problem.
Astronomical rise in prices has led exploration companies to scout for cheaper
alternatives like Xanthan gum and synthetic substitutes like carbon methyl cellulose,
resulting in a fall in demand for guar gum.