Intelligent Information

"There can be no substitute for technology if you want to keep track of poverty in a city and provide for the city's betterment, especially the slums", insists Pratima Joshi, director of Shelter Associates. The Pune-based NGO she heads has devised a method to employ a Geographical Information System (GIS) in mapping poverty and directing the information thus gathered toward urban development activities. Pratima was recently in Washington DC, at the invitation of the World Bank, to present a paper on this topic at a symposium on Urban Development for Poverty Reduction.
The Geographical information Systems are used to study slums and Maharashtra's municipal councils find new opportunities for civic improvement.
Very often we come across instances in our daily life where the lack of adequate information results in civic chaos and mismanagement. Take rehabilitation work for example. Development projects such as road widening, riverbed work, and construction of bridges leave hundreds displaced. But almost always, the rehabilitation work is haphazard because the civic authorities have little or no clue about the number of people being displaced or the exact number eligible for resettlement. There are other examples too - we come across settlements where the civic body sets up community services like common water posts despite the fact that the inhabitants there have individual tap connections. Fires breaking out in informal settlements claim more victims simply because the affected area is inaccessible to fire engines, and the lanes are not widened because clear geographical details of the area are not available.
All such problems, which eventually lead to wastage of manpower, efforts and resources, arise out of one major cause - the lack of current and comprehensive information about urban areas. And it is this lacuna that Pratima Joshi's team at Shelter Associates (SA) addresses with its use of GIS software.
GIS is a tool which allows one to use and analyse spatial information in conjunction with relevant socio-economic information, and is therefore an ideal basis for planning.GIS integrates spatial information (maps) with any other data one have collected. For example, a typical slum map will show the physical features of the area, but it does not say anything about the inhabitants and their demographics. So,the workers can be sent to collect the relevant socio-economic information about the residents and then superimpose all this on the plane-table map.This ensures that the slum no longer remains a mere blob on the map; it becomes a living entity with a name and a boundary. When one clicks on the boundary, a dialogue box appears which gives settlement information such as location, legal status, hazards due to location, facilities within and around the slum, main castes, religions, languages spoken, etc. A detailed map of each settlement, showing every house, manhole, water point, electric pole, etc is also incorporated. Household-level data is connected to each house on the map, so clicking up a house brings up a dialogue box of information about the residents.
Therefore, the GIS is not merely a mapping system, but a tool to query, analyse, and map data that will lend support to a more effective decision-making process and greater improvement in the field of urban development.