Empowering India’s Rural Women with Basic to Advanced Skills in Geospatial Technology

Overview

Geographic Information System (GIS) has the potential to solve the most pressing problems of the world. No wonder, it is increasingly becoming an integral part of the most significant governance, business, and social development projects. Accordingly, the demand for resources skilled in understanding geospatial data and carrying out spatial analysis using varied geospatial technologies is increasing exponentially.

The Bhu-Kaushal, which loosely translates to Geographic Skills, is an Esri India CSR Program for women empowerment designed to impart basic to advanced learning in GIS to empower rural women with spatial skills and use of GIS technologies. With a better understanding of the value of adopting a geographic approach to problem-solving rural women can collaboratively leverage the context of location and interdependencies of various factors for solving pressing economic, social, and environmental challenges in their rural environs.

Vision: Under the umbrella of women empowerment through the promotion of education and livelihood enhancement projects, the vision of the program is to skill 10,000 rural women in 3 years.

Objectives

y Foster spatial thinking and help rural women leverage ‘The Science of Where’ in every corner of the country. y Help rural women to contextualize location and understand interdependencies and interconnections better. y Hone technology skills of rural women for collective problem-solving, decision-making, and collaboration. y Make rural women job-ready by inculcating basic knowledge and skills in GIS. y Build interest in spatial thinking, maps, and GIS.

Stakeholders Involved

Esri India and the CSC Academy.

Solution and Implementation Plan

Hosted on CSC Academy’s Learning Management System, the program is being rolled out in English and Hindi languages through CSC centres. Championed by Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs) who act as coordinators of the program at every CSC centre, the program has been so far launched in 21 states covering 157 districts. With plans to skill 10,000 rural women in 3 years, the program was formally launched on the 17th of June 2021 and has received an overwhelming response with 5128 students already certified in the first year. The program is now being expanded to other states in a phased manner and plans to cover the entire country in the next six months.

Use of Geospatial Technologies

The essence of the Bhu-Kaushal program is to create awareness about the use of geospatial technologies in solving real-life problems. The course comprises engaging modules that help students to imbibe spatial thinking. The modules enable them to gain a basic understanding of GIS and its concepts, brush their geographic knowledge, identify maps and their uses, and understand the basics of geospatial data and its use in their day-to-day life and in the context of digital systems. This becomes a unique opportunity for the students to acquire skills in leading mapping and analysis solutions. Additionally, they learn how to visualize the data and carry out basic data analysis.

Key Outputs

The “Bhu-Kaushal” program has now enabled more than 5000 rural women with:

y Basic understanding of what is GIS and its concepts. y Helping students to brush their geographic knowledge and identify maps and their uses. y Relate maps in the space. Understand Longitude, Latitude, and Types of projections. y Compare the maps with real-world objects. y Gain a basic understanding of geospatial data and the context of digital systems. y Identify different types of geospatial data. y Read maps, interpret, and use them for basic navigation. y Gain an understanding of surveying and its relationship to GIS y Differentiate between types of survey, how geospatial data is acquired and how it can be viewed on maps. y Relate the applications of GIS and geospatial data in their day-to-day life.