NEW DELHI: To improve planning, execution, and monitoring of the road network development as well as the timely completion of projects, the government is making every effort to finish the GIS mapping of national highways by July. GIS technology, which provides extensive information on alignments and any obstructions in the way of highways, is anticipated to be helpful to road construction organisations.

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) has instructed all of its field units and state governments to finish the GIS mapping process of the whole national highway network by July 31 in order to increase the speed of highway building to 50 km per day.

They have been told to use the data for mapping, already gathered by the Bhaskaracharya National Institute for Space Applications, for field verification exercise.

Bhaskaracharya National Institute for Space Applications and Geo-informatics (BISAG-N), Gandhinagar, Gujarat has done GIS mapping of approximately 130,000 km of national highways. But this data now needs to be updated and verified by field units of the different agencies for the ministry.

GIS mapping makes use of satellite images but goes beyond it by analysing satellite data in order to provide authorities with an accurate picture of the project.

The National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), the prime highway executing agency, has almost completed the exercise for the NHs assigned with them with the cooperation of their field units. It is expected that once other agencies also complete the task by next month, work on new highway alignments could be started at a faster pace.