Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Details of roads now just a click away

PATNA: Bosses in road construction department (RCD) in Bihar now do not waste time going through the hard copies of maps and other details of national highways (NH), state highways (SH) and major district roads (MDR). For, they have at their disposal GIS (global information system) maps of these roads.

Prepared by a Bangaluru-based firm, the map provides satellite images of all the aforesaid roads, maps of which have been stored in digitised form. These maps have been provided to the senior RCD officials at the headquarters and for them details of these roads are now just a mouse click away.

"Basic details like length and type of roads have already been entered and now scheme details are being entered in the maps so that the moment one opens the map of a road, details about the work done on the road would be available," said a senior RCD official.

He said that such details would be of great help when senior officials would go for field inspections as they would be equipped with vital information and could check things in a very short period of time.

He said that these maps would be also be of great help as far as planning for future road construction works and setting up new link roads go.

"As these GIS maps also have details of the inhabited areas located along roads, it would be very easy to take decision about link roads, construction of which could help people reach from one point to another covering a shorter distance," added the official.

Incidentally, the RCD bosses are not going to keep this facility limited to the state headquarters only and as a follow up step they are working out a proposal which talks about making these GIS maps web enabled so that field officials too could have access to this vital information. "Though the process would take some time, once it happens, the field officials would be better enabled as far as planning on their part is concerned," said the official.

He did not rule out making this map available on the net so that common people too have access to it. "We may take this step, but any final decision on this front is yet to be taken," he said.

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