GUWAHATI, July 27 � Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman Dr K Radhakrishnan, who is also the Secretary, Union Department of Space, said today that the ISRO has been extending support to the remote sensing centres of the States.
Dr Radhakrishnan, who was talking to this correspondent during his short visit to the Assam Science Technology and Environment Council (ASTEC) here this afternoon, also said that the North East Space Application Centre (NESAC) of the ISRO has been coordinating with the remote sensing centres of the NE States.
The ISRO is extending support also in matters of tele-medicine, tele-education, setting up village resource centres and in matters of disaster management, among others.
It is also providing some forms of weather forecast for the benefit of the common people, he added.
Dr Radhakrishnan, who was on a two-day visit to the NE region to attend the NESAC governing council meeting at Shillong yesterday, informed that the NESAC is preparing a plan of action for the next five years.
Besides attending the NESAC governing council meeting, the ISRO Chairman also inaugurated yesterday the NE Regional Disaster Risk Reduction Node at the Shillong NESAC complex.
ASTEC Director Dr SK Choudhury and Assam Remote Sensing and Application Centre (ARSAC) head Utpal Sarma later told this correspondent that the ARSAC Division of the ASTEC is working with the ISRO as a partner institute in various natural resource mapping programmes initiated by the ISRO.
In recent times, ARSAC has successfully completed projects like�land use, land cover mapping, land degradation mapping, updation of wasteland and in preparing national wetland inventory and assessment on 1:50,000 scale under the National Resource Census Programme of the ISRO.
In addition to this, ARSAC is also involved in pre-harvest crop acreage estimation for rice, mustard and jute.
For all the above projects, NESAC is coordinating on behalf of the ISRO, said Dr Choudhury and Sarma.
By this time, the ARSAC has started creation of the cadastral level digital data base, which will be a baseline data for the project � Space-based Information Support for Decentralised Planning (SIS-DP).
Under this programme, 1:10,000 scale thematic maps will be generated using high resolution Indian satellite data. All the thematic layers will be integrated with cadastral data base, which will help in grass-root development planning.
ISRO will fully support the SIS-DP programme. The States of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Chhatisgarh have by this time developed digitized cadastral maps and with such maps they have been able to design their land-related development activities.
Gujarat could allot land to the Tatas for their Nano car factory within four days because of the availability of the digitized data, said Dr Choudhury and Sarma.
