NIC established RS & GIS Division, in 1996 to carry out innovative projects in the emerging areas of Geographical Information System and Remote Sensing.

The Division was tasked with establishment of “Multi-Layer Geographical Information System (GIS) for Planning” by the erstwhile Planning Commission with a total outlay of Rs. 40.50 Crore during the period 2005-10. At the time of launch of the project, the requirement was to integrate diverse & heterogeneous map data available with various National survey organizations. It was a challenging task as maps existed in multiple scale, projections, datum, format (digital or hard copy) etc. These datasets were not available in a form that can be integrated with IT applications. The three primary data sets procured and processed to create Multi-layer GIS Framework are topographic map data at 1:50K scale and Verified village boundary from Survey of India and Satellite images of varying resolutions from Department Of Space.

NIC has created Multi-Layer GIS Platform named "NICMAPS" which depicts core foundation data an integrated base map service using 1:50,000 scale reference data from Survey of India, ISRO, FSI and RGI and so on. This encompass 23 layers containing administrative boundaries, transport layers such as roads & railways, forest layer, settlement locations etc., including terrain map services.

Salient Features:

• • Rich Internet Application (RIA), with cross platform and browser support, has been developed visualized along with Mash-ups with Global GIS Services.
• • NIC spatial data repository has been updated as per the standards and around 1000 vector layers comprising of Administrative Boundaries, Transportation Network and Natural Features etc. has been used for this composition.
• • NIC Base Map service consisting of pre-composed maps and served using tile cache from scales ranging from 1: 20 Million - 1:20000. High scale Maps has been incorporated for seven cities on the scale of 1:10000 to 1:4000 and 1:10000 scale layers for rest of India.
• • NIC Satellite Imagery service consists of satellite images of varying resolutions like AWiFS (56 m), LISS ( 23.5 m) and PAN ( 5.80 m).
• • NIC Terrain Map service developed using contour data from Survey of India.

Up-scaling of multi layered GIS Project:

This project was taken as SFC of NIC, MeitY to scale up GIS assets from 1:50 K to 1:10K using high-resolution satellite images from Cartosat1 and Resourcesat2 satellite. This led to creation of raster database as well as extraction of infrastructure layers such as road, rail, canals, rivers, water bodies, settlements and forest etc.as global standards. During the course of Up scaling of multi layered project, GIS cloud infrastructure has been set-up and is being used for development and hosting of web GIS applications.

In order to fulfill the objectives of Digital India to establish end-to-end geo-spatial electronics delivery systems as part of National GIS Mission Mode Project, GIS Platform established by NIC, MeitY, using NICMAPS Services has been revamped as “BHARATMAPS”. This depicts core foundation data as "NICMAPS", an integrated multi-scale multi-resolution base map service using reference data from Survey of India, ISRO, FSI, and RGI and so on. This encompass large number of layers containing administrative boundaries, transport layers such as roads & railways, forest layer, settlement locations etc., including many base map services.

NIC is collaborating with various Ministries and Departments for establishing GIS based systems for planning and monitoring and developing and implementing visualization applications like Dashboards. Some of the projects under executions are: School GIS, Postal GIS, GIS for Financial Inclusion – Bank GIS, Telecom GIS, BBNL GIS, BSNL GIS, GIS powered Dashboards in Ministries of Rural Development, Swatch Bharat Mission, DILRMP, Drinking water etc.