Bridging Urban-Rural Divide in India

“Spatial planning becomes eminently capable of catching the popular imagination through the creation of Digital Twins,” says Alok Prem Nagar, Joint-Secretary, Ministry of Panchayati Raj in a conversation with Geospatial World.

What are the new opportunities that the National Geospatial Policy will unravel for the Ministry of Panchayati Raj?

The Ministry of Panchayat has been devoted to the artificial divide between urban and rural areas. If you are in a village that means you can't have good quality services. You are not assured that if the power goes out or if there's a water supply failure, how quickly you can get it fixed. Whereas, that is not the situation in villages. So a constant endeavour for us has been trying to extend these services to everybody in Gram Panchayat (GP) as well, so that at least on that front, people are not inconvenienced.

With the new Geospatial Policy and this data being available by and large in the public domain, of course, there are some accuracy constraints and scale constraints. But other than that, with the demand that is going to rise from the rural areas, I think it enables the private sector and various kinds of partners to come together, and unleash this big opportunity that we have.

For instance, we have been working on smart villages, so now with the data restrictions out of the way, one can expect that people would dedicate putting together all the information that is there, to pull out information from the innumerable databases that we have in the government, and then make sure that if there is a water supply disruption, then the house has got a barcode, somebody comes and scans that, and your complaint is logged.

Then within a certain time limit, which is enforced by the

Panchayat, which has a contract with a group of young skilled people dedicated to this task, it is ensured that the problem is removed at the earliest possible, or as per the policy that is agreed upon. We've seen that during the Covid time, vaccine delivery was such a big hit because the drones could do that with the continuously operating referencing station network, and with five-centimeter accuracy data being available everywhere.

Especially enabled by the new Geospatial Policy, those things are not an issue anymore, and it just needs people to have a fresh re-look at the work that they've been doing, to refocus their energies on newer geographies and to give services to the rural folk that are long overdue to them.

The policy has actually emphasized more on publicprivate partnerships, like having hand-in-hand while working for the development of the nation. How do you see this strengthening the projects and the programs of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj?

We had a smart village Panchayat program in the month of September in Uttar Pradesh, where we got a lot of industry people together. We did have people who were already working in the rural landscapes, and their work was related to how do you find comparative advantages in sourcing your, food grain or certain rations for a certain location and in a manner that minimizes the loss to these people incur and increases the value that they can get from their money.

There was of course telemedicine there, and Health Buddy, an application, which was an eye-opener. What they were doing on a very small scale with a lot of resource-intensive applications of technologies with the kind of scale that is available to us. And with the fact that these things have already been tested over smaller areas, I think it is a natural progression that more and more people will be covered in the future.

This is something I also told the people from the ICAI (Institute of Charting Accountants) in a meeting, that you were too focused on your urban area, and I don't know if it'll stop people to get more and more invested in these technologies and to reach out. the influx from the rural areas. But then one thing that also became clear with the Covid lockdowns, is that if you are in a good clean landscape with good internet connectivity, and good environments, then it doesn't bother you if you're working from Bangalore or Mashobra in Himachal Pradesh.

You may need to have a longer break-even period in the time that your investment fully comes to flower. But my whole presumption is that why would people not want these good quality services back in their villages? If that presumption holds good, then it's only a matter of time before this whole thing is going to catch on, and the people who move now would then be able to reap the initial mover advantages.

So that kind of a realization is now there with us. If services, facilities, and value-added services are available to you within your villages, you don't need to move out if you've got good schools and good hospitals coming up in your neighborhood. And to do all this by itself is not something that a government is capable of here or anywhere else. So private partnership that is viable really makes economic sense by the sheer scale of it, for

The policy stressed on building a national Digital Twin that will catalyze the new digital revolution. How do you see the national Digital Twin helping rural economies?

Before the rural economy, there is another endeavor that the Ministry of Panchayati Raj was involved in, to a limited extent. It takes off from the PURA (Providing Urban Amenities to Rural Areas) concept that was initially mooted by President APJ Abdul Kalam. It again had the same presumption that why can't villages have city-like services available to them? And what we tried to do is through our knowledge of the roads network and state and national highways that were passing through villages and Panchayats, initially and of course depending on the interest of the state, we narrowed down to 34 Gram Panchayat all over the country. Two in the vicinity, 17 sets of two GPs each all over the place. And to these, we mapped the local architecture with planning colleges. In the initial phase, which was in 2021-22, we got them to develop spatial development plans for these areas.

In a village, it is characterized by narrow lanes with filth, drains that are not draining, and disease and pestilence. So if a fire tender needs to approach, I don't know how it'll do it. Why go to extraordinary events like a fire, it’s impossible even if you want to get your septic tank clean. So for a vehicle to drive into a place and to be able to do that and move out effectively, it is a hell of a bother. Why? Because these places grew organically. They were never planned.

With a Digital Twin, I feel that we have a real advantage of making people see what a reimagined village can look like. That is the first important step that people should see the value of. Right now, the engagements that we've had in Panchayats are, people think that having rural area planning is going to insert license raj in some form. So it is a bother.

Digital Twin to begin with, I feel, will help us create this awareness and this readiness for the villages to adopt spatial planning. This is again an extension of the ‘why can't they have the same facility that people in cities do?’ Which is why people don't stick to villages.

You find doctors getting posted to villages, but nobody stays because soon as that guy gets married, he has to be in a better place. If there is a child that has to go to a school, where is the school? Where does one take their parents in case of health emergencies? Put all these things there, and increasingly you'll find that they do not have a reason to move out of cities.

Spatial planning is something that becomes eminently capable of catching the popular imagination through the creation of Digital Twins. I am looking to do it in fact over the next three, or four months, so that by the time we are in the month of July, we can have a series of three or four national workshops where we would be engaging with Panchayat to tell them this thing because this thing can't be top driven.

The political leadership in a state will also go by what their GPs are telling them, and how people feel about it. So unless we banish this fear of a new license raj from their minds, and we make them see that this is what your village can look like should you apply yourself to the situation. Again, that's not something that the government could do out of its own funding purely. We'll have to find alternative strategies. We need to find banks. We need to find people parting their lands in a certain part of our village.

We'll need to devise multistorage structures. You can't be spread out all over the ground. If you are growing as a population, you have to rise vertically. All these things would become possible I think with this Digital Twin coming through. In fact, in this endeavor I would be creating not a Digital Twin maybe, but some kind of a 3D model of each of these GPs that we had chosen for ourselves, and then work on them and in the Panchayats in their proximity, so that more and more people could come to agree with us.

A flurry of geospatial enterprise in the industry, academia, and research is being planned by the government. How do you see this trickling down to the rural areas?

It has to be tied to the utility. People ask me, ‘why is the Panchayati Raj participating in SVAMITVA scheme?’ I am clueless really. But it is also a fact that we've been able to break a lot of ground. We have kept with the milestone that we had devised for ourselves. Why? Because we are the user department. We are in the business of first seeing what value it's going to bring to the people, and then everything works backwards from there.

We are not people who are in an enterprise because of the technology that we are trying to push. That is something we do, and that is something which is ingrained in all our endeavors, whether it be a people's plan campaign. If people see a utility, it is linked to all these other things that I have said from the very beginning, a smart village, better services, citizens, charter, and people having all manner of facilities sitting there in their villages.

Once these values are very clear to them, technology is something that is a means to an end. And once the ends are clear to the people, there would be a demand. Then the private sector and everybody who is in this domain have to double time to keep up with the expectations. For example, we are currently with the CORS Network that we had set up. If you put meteorological sensors on all your stations, then it is possible for you to get better quality weather forecasts, maybe at a block and Zila level.

We are not in the weather business, nor are we in the CORS technology business. But what is our business is that people at a local level can get a better weather forecast. We are now in the process of bringing together an MoU between the IMD and the Survey of India.

We are also signatories because it'll be our job to ensure that the information gets encapsulated in the form of a Panchayat or Zila Panchayatlevel broadcast and that the messaging goes out to these people.

This is an example of how the clarity of the use is going to lead to better utilization of technology in a manner that works to the advantage of everybody concerned.

Interviewed by Sachin Awana