Government to use remote sensing, GIS for rural development – Times of India

The government has introduced a new portal under “Bhuvan Yuktdhara” to facilitate planning of new MGNREGA assets using Remote Sensing and GIS based information. This platform will serve as a repository of assets (Geotags) created under various national rural development programmes like MGNREGA, Integrated Watershed Management Programme, Per Drop More Crop and Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana etc., along with field photographs.
This platform is built by joint efforts of ISRO and Ministry of Rural development for rural planning in support of decentralized decision making.
Union Minister of Rural Development & Panchayati Raj, Giriraj Singh said that this portal integrates a wide variety of thematic layers, multi-temporal high resolution earth observation data with analysis tools. Planners will analyse previous assets under various schemes and facilitate identification of new works using online tools.
“Plans prepared will be evaluated by appropriate authorities under State Departments. Thus, Yuktdhara based plans will be prepared by grassroot functionary and verified by appropriate authorities for relevance and resource allocation. This would ensure quality of plan and enable a long term monitoring of the assets created over the years,” he added.
The Before-During-After Geotagging of assets has successfully implemented the progress based disbursement of the funds during the process of creation of rural assets. Also, a Citizen-centric Mobile Application JANMANREGA has helped rural population by providing feedback using Bhuvan services.