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336 Economic Survey 2021-22

Box 3: Revised Guidelines for Acquiring and Producing Geospatial Data

On 15th February 2021 the Department of Science and Technology released guidelines for the
creation, acquisition and use of geospatial data, including maps. Being critical to mapping activities
in India, geospatial data was previously heavily regulated and required licenses to be obtained for the
use of such data. Given the increase in freely and publicly available geospatial data and services, the
erstwhile restrictions had become redundant and severely hampered technological innovation in the
sector, which specifically affected domestic players. The newly released guidelines aim to build a
more permissive regime which opens up the industry to collaboration and progress, while supporting
Indian companies operating in this sector.
Some key changes under the guidelines are as follows:
l Introduction of a self-certification regime: All entities are now required to follow a self-
certification process to show adherence to the guidelines, as opposed to obtaining prior approval
or licenses for the use of geospatial data and maps.
l Relaxation of restricted areas: Mapping activities are prohibited only for specific attributes of
highly sensitive locations, as opposed to restricted areas under the previous regime.
l Specific permissibility for Indian Entities: Only Indian owned and controlled entities are
permitted to (i) use geospatial data above a certain special accuracy; (ii) use specific technologies
such as ground truthing and verification; and (iii) conduct activities such as street view surveying
and surveying in Indian territorial waters. While non-Indian companies are not permitted to
undertake any of the above, they can license this data from Indian entities through the use of
APIs, only for the purposes of serving their Indian customers,
l Relaxation on export restrictions: The guidelines permit the export of maps with resolutions up
to a 1:100 resolution thereby relaxing the previous threshold of 1:250000. Maps which are finer
than the specified resolution threshold must be localised, and are only permitted to be stored and
processed on servers located within India.
l Open access to publicly funded data: The guidelines require all geospatial data produced using
public funds, including data produced by the Survey of India, to be freely accessible to all Indian
entities, for scientific, economic and developmental purposes. Certain categories of classified
geospatial data will been exempted from this requirement.

Startups
9.57 Startups in India have grown remarkably over the last six years, most of these belong
to the services sector. During 2021, the Government recognised over 14,000 new startups as
compared to only, only 733 new startups during 2016-17. As a result, more than 61,400 startups
have been recognised in India as of January 10, 2022. Figure 9 &Figure 10 show the spread of
startups in Indian districts. During 2021, 555 districts had atleast one new startup. On the other
hand, only 121 districts had atleast 1 new startup in 2016-17.