V.S. Karandikar
Chief Engineer, Public Works Department, Maharashtra, India
Amit Prakash
Team Coordinator, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, India
P.S. Bindu, Prashant Nayak
Member Technical Staff, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Pune, India
Introduction
The concept of e-governance fits in where public organizations are concerned with efficiency, effectiveness and transparency in their delivery systems. The initiative taken by Public Works Department (PWD), Government of Maharashtra, in this direction has been pioneering and commendable. In association with C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), Pune, India PWD has been successful in bringing about a paradigm shift in the business of governance by leveraging on the opportunities provided by advancements in Information and Communications technology.
Public Works Department (PWD), Government of Maharashtra is the principal governing body for planning, design, construction and maintenance of roads and bridges in the entire state. The state has a road network whose total length exceeds 0.2 million km. The system of archival of road data prevalent in PWD was through traditional paper road maps, engineering drawings and road statistics registers. Voluminous and scattered data, maps in different formats and scales, difficulty in accessing the statistical information of a map feature etc. were some of the irritants in the prevalent system. A need was increasingly felt in the department to have a more scientific and systematic approach for the archival of maps and retrieval of statistical information.
In this context, the inherent capabilities of the technology offered in a GIS were looked upon as one having a great potential to successfully cater to the specified requirements. A project for utilizing it
