Map World Forum Hyderabad, India DEVELOPMENT OF GIS BASED SPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURE FOR MICRO-LEVEL PLANNING

Geospatial technologies play a key role in generating timely and reliable information for planning and decision making at all the levels from macro to micro. Even though it is widely recognized that GIS is a modern technological tool to analyse both spatial and non-spatial data including temporal aspects in a cost-effective and efficacious manner, its application at micro-level for utilities planning and resource management is limited. For planning at microlevel, a village is considered to be a viable micro-administrative unit. India has enormous unexploited potential of natural resources and knowledgeable human resources in rural and remote areas. Hence development of spatial data infrastructure at village level will help in inventorying these resources into micro-level database. The present paper focuses on the development of spatial data infrastructure at village level for a part of Allahabad district of Uttar Pradesh State under GIS environment which can be subsequently used in the planning and development of rural infrastructure. The GIS based spatial data infrastructure consists of various thematic maps (e.g., village boundary map, block/ tehsil boundaries maps, etc.), demographic data, socio-economic data and data related to infrastructural facilities (e.g., roads, educational facilities, health facilities, drinking water, power supply, etc.). Further, various utilities available in the study area have also been represented spatially using GIS. A menu driven Graphical User Interface has also been developed incorporating the above aspects using Visual Basic 6.0 and ArcObjects of ArcGIS software for increasing its acceptability and utilization among planners and decision-makers. It is expected that user friendly GIS based spatial data infrastructure generated at microadministrative unit will increase the efficacy of administration and resource mobilization as well as help in informed decision-making.