BY FAR the most ambitious GIS application has been the MEF's project on wastelands development and land-use management. The project, undertaken in 1991 by the National Afforestation and Eco-Development Board with financial aid from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), consisted of 8 pilot studies to be carried out by an equal number of institutions in different districts of the country.

The 8 institutions and the respective districts they studied were -- the Space Application Centre, Ahmedabad (Dungarpur); the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Dehra Dun (Purulia, West Bengal); the Centre of Studies in Resource Engineering, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (Nasik, Maharashtra); the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Anna University, Madras (Madurai, Tamil Nadu); the National Remote Sensing Agency, Hyderabad (Sundergarh, Orissa and Bellary, Karnataka); NISTADS (Gurgaon, Haryana and Alwar, Rajasthan); the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (Khedda, Gujarat); the Forest Survey of India, Dehra Dun (Almora, Uttar Pradesh).

The pilot phase is over and the projects reports have been submitted, and the MEF is thinking of extending the projects to see if the prescriptions suggested by the studies can actually be translated into reality.

The pilot studies were basically designed to demonstrate the utility of the GIS technology in preparing the wasteland development plan. Earlier, the National Wastelands Development Board, with the help of the department of space, had mapped India's wastelands using remote sensing technology. The satellite maps generated through this project provided 13-fold classification of wastelands and indicated the exact location and the extent of the wastelands. One hundred and forty-six districts were mapped, using 1:50,000 scale.

Using the GIS, experts at the participating institutions integrated these pictures with manually-prepared maps of data such as soil types, topography and watertables, and other non-spatial data such as population, climate and vegetation. But before the final analysis, the physical maps and other data, tabular or statistical, was digitised and stored as different layers of information in the computer. These maps of various data were then superimposed over one another to get an integrated view.

Experts then analysed and interpreted this comprehensive picture to suggest an action plan on how a wasteland can be developed. For instance, what species of plants or crops should be grown in an area to get the maximum benefit. Or what occupation a villager should adopt in a particular place so that she or he can enhance earnings to the maximum.

Unfortunately, if data do not exist, they cannot be put into a GIS. End of dream. A GIS does not and cannot accelerate or decelerate the data-gathering task, which works independently of the GIS operation. It simply makes much better use of available data.