• Bhuvan, ISRO's free imaging service, can have commercial spinoffs
     
• ISRO hopes to boost its share in the satellite image market
     
• The size of this market in India is estimated to be over Rs 340 crore
     
• These images are used by urban planners and telecom firms

With a resolution of 10 metres offered by Bhuvan, one can clearly see a vehicle the size of a mini van. Google Earth's 200 metres resolution, on the other hand, is just about enough to make out big apartment blocks. Besides that, ISRO also plans to update the images each year. Google Earth does not offer such a service, making its images outdated for a rapidly changing country like India. Bhuvan will focus on the Indian subcontinent and, if all goes well, spread its operations elsewhere. The images will be sourced from ISRO's wide network of satellites that include the Cartosat series and the Indian Mini Satellite.

Bhuvan, says director of National Remote Sensing Centre V. Jayaraman, will be a visualisation tool that will organise available satellite images and overlay them with geographical details in GIS format from the government's database, like those about natural resources. Besides urban areas, the project will also map rural areas. He adds that Bhuvan will respect all rules put down by the Remote Sensing Data Policy. That may mean lowering the resolution of "sensitive locations".

Interestingly, the name Bhuvan was thought of as an effort to bring back attention to the earth after ISRO's recent successful moon mission. "Ultimately, we hope to allow users to mark locations on Bhuvan," states Jayaraman.

R. Siva Kumar, CEO of the government-backed National Spatial Database Infrastructure, says Bhuvan will make geospatial data more accessible and affordable. "With a bird's eye view it will certainly help an individual relate better spatially with his environment, like find out if he or she lives in close proximity to a sewer." The launch of Bhuvan will also benefit experts who would like to make use of free high-resolution images for urban planning and traffic management, besides several other applications.

But will Bhuvan be a worthy competitor for Google? P.K. Roy, editor, Cybermedia Group of publications, doubts so. "It will be difficult to replicate Google's success, for it is not just about providing the images. They need to be translated into a usable context and meaningful form, something that Google Maps and Google Earth have done extremely well," he says. The combined use of the two, allowing maps to be superimposed on satellite images, is becoming popular in India with the increasing use of internet-enabled phones. Google Map Maker was also launched in India in August 2008 and encourages users to identify locations they know on the map.

"We are living in times where mass participation is inevitable. Open mapping is here to stay," says T.P. Venu, senior assistant editor of Geospatial Today, a niche magazine published from Hyderabad. Whether Bhuvan becomes as popular as Google Earth will therefore largely depend on ISRO's capability to convince the growing internet community in India to use it.

At another level, Bhuvan is an attempt to rekindle interest in planned development using satellite images, where ISRO has a 90 per cent domestic market share.