GIS BASED MODELLING FOR RURAL rNFRASTRUCTURAL PLANNING

Abstract

India is rural based country where 70% of the people live in villages and nearly 260 million people are living below poverty line. There is a big gap between the urban and rural India in terms of basic civic amenities and employment. From 1951 onwards, various rural development schemes under Five-year plan has been started by the Govt, but still the desired goals have not been achieved. The president of India, Dr.A.P.J.Kalam, has written a book on India VISION-2020. Where he has defined the technical processes to make India developed by year 2020. In this regard, Dr.Kalam has announced a scheme called PURA (Providing Urban amenities in Rural Areas). According to Dr. Kalam,"PURA is one of the mechanisms which will be utilized for transforming our villages into a productive economic zone". To achieve the target, proper planning is required using a conceptual model. Satellite remote sensing has become one of the inevitable techniques to provide timely and reliable data for planning. Geographical Information System (GIS) provides a useful tool for the integration and analysis of multi-thematic information required for making decisions. In the present study, modelling for rural infrastructural planning has been carried out using ancillary data in GIS. Laksar block has been selected for detailed investigations. In total it consists of 116 villages, required data has been collected from the field visits. The detailed objectives of the work are (1) studying the existing facilities such as road network, educational institutions, health centres, post-offices, industries, etc and preparation of database in GIS. (ii)development of facility index for educational facilities, medical facilities, transport facilities and communication facilities, (iii) iii identification of the gaps in the facilities, and (iv) development of GUI for Customization of Arc GIS 8.3 using VB 6.0, for (i), (ii) & (iii) above. An integrated geographic database, consisting of spatial as well as non-spatial data, has been created in Arc GIS. The spatial elements of the database include various feature classes describing village boundaries, drainage, transportation network, contours. The non-spatial elements consist of data related to education, medical, post office, approach road to village, power supply, market/shopping centre, literacy rate and irrigated land area. The education facility has been considered at the levels of nursery, primary, middle and high schools, pre-university college and adult education centre. The medical facilities include, Primary Health Centre (PHC), hospital, community health centre, private health centre, ayurvedic hospital, homeopathic hospital, and veterinary hospital. Transportation facility includes pucca roads, kutcha roads, rail, national highway, state highway and district highway. Communication facility includes STD, PCO, post-office, telegraphic office and courier service. For these educational, health, transportation, and communication facility, separate index has been calculated. Using these indexes, the villages have been divided into villages with poor, average and good facilities. Subsequently, the study identified the villages which needs the immediate attention of facilities.