GUWAHATI, Feb 16 — The first phase of the National (Natural) Resource Information System Project, aiming to create a national-level database on the resources of the country, is expected to be completed in Assam by March this year. The initial phase of the project in the State will cover Kamrup district.
Other districts will be covered in the next phases, sources in the Assam Science and Technology and Environment Council (ASTEC) said. The NRIS project was launched by the Government of India in 1999-2000 to have a total database on the resources like forests, soil, water, etc., to help policy planners to chart the country’s developmental path. The NRIS, the sources said, is supposed to have 19 layers of information on each district of the country.
According to the sources, the project cost for each district is Rs 20 lakh, in addition to the costs involved in procuring remote sensing data and computer hardware and software. The costs are to be shared equally by the State government and the Department of Space (DoS) of the Centre. In Assam, the task of creating the NRIS has been entrusted to the Assam Remote Sensing Application Centre (ARSAC), one among the four divisions of the ASTEC.
The sources said that the database for Kamrup was supposed to have been created by 2002. The project has been lagging behind due to fund constraints and the non-availability of local laboratory facilities. In states like Maharashtra and Gujarat, the NRIS project has gone far ahead. In those states, policy planners like Secretariat officials and district officials are already being imparted training on the use of the database for the development of the districts. The State government has not been able to release its share of the NRIS, costs, the sources revealed. There is also the problem of getting skilled manpower, the sources said. Water quality monitoring has been hampered by the lack of proper laboratory facilities.
In fact, the sources said, the ARSAC itself is running solely on Centrally-sponsored projects. Due to the State government’s financial crunch, the ARSAC has not been able to take up projects on its own. The State government’s grant-in-aid for the ARSAC has not been given for the last three years, the sources said. It covers the ARSAC’s salary bill. As of now, it is the Centre’s Department of Science and Technology (DST) that meets the ARSAC’s needs through scheme-type grants. The DoS has given the ARSAC a lot of equipment. The running costs of the ARSAC is about Rs 31 lakh annually, the sources said. Of that Rs 25 lakh is the salary component. There are 20 posts in the ARSAC at present out of the total of 25 sanctioned posts, the sources added.