How India Is Using Drones To Map Property And Slum Areas

66 percent of all litigations in India are related to property disputes or titles. With such overwhelming numbers, it comes as no surprise that the Indian government, with the help of private companies, is using high-tech digital prowess to sort this issue. According to reports, the Odisha government has been using drones to map out the urban slums over the past year. Now, they are ready to give titles to 2,00,000 households in urban slums and those on the outskirts of cities by the end of 2018. The state housing department commissioner also added that the feat, if done physically, may have taken them years and years to achieve. Now, Maharashtra, which houses the largest slum in the country in Mumbai, is ready to do the same. In fact, Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had also talked about addressing the farmers’ woes and rate of suicides by leveraging drones and AI technology. He also spoke about how technology could be used to usher sustainability in the era of climate change. Figuring out informal or illegal settlements using manpower requires immense time and effort. Door-to-door monitoring, talking to persons, going through family disputes that go decades back, is a tough job. On the other hand, using technology such as drones, geospatial monitoring, artificial intelligence and machine learning to map, collect and asses data is infinitely cheaper. “Understanding human settlement patterns in rapidly urbanising cities is important because of the stress on civic resources and public utilities... Geospatial analysis can help identify stress zones, and allow civic authorities to focus their efforts in localised areas,” said Nikhil Kaza, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina who worked on a seven-year-long project that deals with slums in Bengaluru. He was speaking to a noted newswire.