Visakhapatnam: Taking a giant step forward with technology and in a first-of-its-kind initiative in Andhra Pradesh, the Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation (GVMC) will soon embark on generating digital data and GIS-based maps of urban property and settlements located in Vizag city, totalling to about 5 lakh assessments. These include buildings and vacant plots, commercial complexes, drainage systems, colony and ward boundaries, parks, hospitals, schools, sewerage networks, garbage collection points and road networks.
The GIS-based mapping will generate digital aerial photographic data within a suitable swathe for 3D mapping and processing to interpret and digitalise the physical features from the photographs. This massive exercise, which covers a 600-sq-km area of the city, is expected to be an effective tool for analysing and displaying thematic maps of all the structures and infrastructure of the city. This digitalisation process also envisages a detailed study in the Zone-II area of the city, including geo-coding of property linked to each assessment, with details, such as water, trade and advertisement taxes, unassigned properties, vacant lands and government properties, besides data generated for the entire GVMC area.
The digital data will be integrated with the existing data with base maps and all the properties will be again physically surveyed for accuracy of detail, such as the number of floors in a building. GVMC additional commissioner (finance), S.S. Varma, said that the digital data and GIS-mapping could help the corporation have geographical and topographical data about each structure and the entire infrastructure of the city with its exact spatial dimensions.
“This system will help contain the revenue leakages of the civic body, and also provide information with exactitude, such as the precise measurements of a structure, or how many signboards there are in the city, details of the drainage system or the colony and ward boundaries. We will be able to easily trace the irregularities being perpetrated once the infrastructure of every zone of the city gets geo-tagged. This could also help prevent such malpractice in the future,” Mr Varma said.
