Even before I knew about local guides program I was always excited about maps and navigation.
India is a developing country where infrastructure is growing fast. Not only new roads, places come up but then there is a strange trend here of renovating places and naming them different.
As a professional photographer I click pictures with a saleable and artistic perspective wherever I go, but being a local guide provided me with a different perspective.
There are many things challenging in India, the most important one being the one I mentioned above when there is a new place in the same place within a span of year under different name. Because consumers in India want something new always. So the same restaurant owner renovates his own hotel and puts up a new one with new theme in the same place. This gets very confusing to people who use maps. This doesn’t happen with famous hotels which have a kind of cult since many years and have become like heritage sites.
Another interesting thing in India is the two-wheelers. Not always that a road suggested by maps will be good for a car which might be for twowheeler and viceversa. One-ways or road renovations change or happen very often. This again confuses the system, though its improved quite a lot since google started co-ordinating with local authorities. Yet it cannot be fool proof.
The best part of working as a local guide is helping my community for free. Its not just that I am helping people find their way, but I help businesses to get the right information like exact location or contact information out there. This especially helps when there are a lot of fake people going around taking money from local businesses posing as google maps employees.