Digitally mapping India

WASHINGTON, DC: In a way, he leads an army. Of over 200 surveyors, that is, who are scouring the country digitally plotting every single road in India so that it could be put on an interactive map and be accessed to get driving directions from anywhere to just any other city or village across the nation.  Twenty-one-year-old Stanford University electrical engineering student Rohan Verma also directs the work of over 30 software programmers based in New Delhi, all of whom are dedicated to just one task — not to let you get lost.

The MapMyIndia.com website — India’s first web destination that offers interactive driving directions on both online as well as mobile platforms — has been the culmination of 12 years of work put in by the surveyors, and later interpreted by a team led by Rohan Verma and his parents, who own the New Delhi-based software company CE Infosystems. “It’s still going on, by the way,” says Verma.

The 2007 version of the site, launched a week ago in India complete with driving directions, mobile phone applications and e-Locations, was Verma’s brainchild. “We are so used to the accuracy of Yahoo Maps or Mapquest or Google Maps in the US, that we felt it is time for us to launch a similar service in India,” says Verma. “The problem was that there are no digital maps that you can reference. Our company had to do everything on its own.”

In the US, the government owns a database of digital maps called Tiger Files, which companies like Yahoo or Google buy to be used on their mapping software. There are other companies like Nazteq and TeleAtlas who provide navigable maps to these portals. It then boils down to fit the navigable maps and the Tiger files to your custom software. No such luck in India, though.

“Our fundamental issue was how to show driving directions for Indian roads because a) they are not all named; b) the names keep changing, and c) Indians are not used to a scientific road nomenclature regime like, say, in the US or in Europe,” says Verma. “When you tell a person how to reach your place, you often tell her to ‘turn left at the telephone booth, or take a U-turn at the paanwala’s shop’.”

To overcome this difficulty, Verma also created a feature called e-Location which allows users to create their own customised location on the website depending on the personal address. “The e-Location address can then be used just like an e-mail address on your business card,” says Verma. “Suppose someone wants to visit you at your office, all he has to do is use the e-Location on your business card to get to know where you are. This is an easy way to overcome India’s unique problem of a vast network of roads, half of which are disorganised. Using e-Location, we could avoid getting lost during the last stretch of our journey.”

He adds, “Let’s just say we wanted to get rid of the map version of the ‘last-mile’ problem.”

As of now, MapMyIndia has plotted detailed road maps for 170 cities and over five lakh villages. “Delhi is the most detailed city we have right now,” says Verma. “Mumbai is next. It is interesting as well as gratifying that we have been able to advance the programming paradigm in India with our venture.”