In the era of digitalization, effective policy-making and budgetary allocation for technological innovation have gained salience in the Union Budget 2022–23. Location intelligence is a seminal component of the technological revolution will find widespread overarching applications in what the Finance Ministry has identified to be sunrise sectors, which include fields like Artificial Intelligence, drones, geospatial systems, etc., to name a few. Over the years, location intelligence has expanded its scope immensely and has found application across sectors ranging from agriculture to town planning, real estate to finance etc. hence with the new budget; its horizons expand further.
A focal point for the budget was smart farming, which aimed to enhance the efficiency of farming systems. Using location intelligence in conjunction with drone technology for spraying insecticides, fertilizers and nutrients, and monitoring of crops and livestock would help increase farm productivity. Secondly, the digitization of land records via location intelligence would help the government in updating legacy records, as well as being able to rationalize subsidies schemes and benefits claims where applicable.
The wide variety of possible use cases for location intelligence can make workflows much more time- and cost-efficient for citizens, MSMEs, OEMs, Banking and even Real estate companies that would require precise location data points or imagery for crucial decision making, and would be aided further by the wide-scale adoption and endorsement by the government. With the pandemic having ushered in a tectonic shift and how the world functions, implementation of location technology capabilities, will benefit organizations and businesses in the form of opportunities for gaining better insights across strategic, tactical and operational analytics. Location intelligence has already moved from being a niche to mainline technology. It has been driving public-private partnerships for large infrastructure programmes, ensuring timely completion through tracking, as well as monitoring and managing the performance.
Proving to be an ideal compromise between scalability, economic feasibility, immunity to error and productivity, hence its adoption is quite critical for realizing the potential that its application across industries can yield. As the market size of location intelligence and geospatial technology is slated to grow from Rs.70,600 crores by 2025, it is quite heartening to see that both enterprises, as well as governments, are now realizing the economic and social opportunities that the widespread dispersed geospatial assets of the country can provide for the nation, when leveraged and harnessed effectively.
Views expressed in this article are the personal opinion of Amarsh Chaturvedi, Co-founder and Director, Transerve.
