My first interaction with google maps came during my days in engineering and because of one of the intriguing problems. I was then working on a project to prepare a detailed project report for a ring road for my city of Belgaum. The government and municipal corporations had made a lot of attempts prior to that but had failed because there was insecurity among farmers communities about the land acquisition and they didn't want to part with their lands and given that land acquisition can be a sensitive topic both socially and politically none wanted to take up the land survey because of relevant downsides as a result they had absolutely no data to start estimating the project or even check it' feasibility.
That's when we started finding alternatives to work on this assignment and we stumbled upon Google Earth for Windows. We managed to get a probable alignment that the planning authorities had in mind and managed to plot it on google earth and get the coordinates as well as some of the landmark details with use of satellite imagery. Using all of these my team along with me tied GPS along with altimeters on our legs and walked along the path of alignment of ring road. This was unthinkable at the time for municipal authorities and they were surprised and thankful to us for having come with a detailed report that was accurate to +/- 15%. Link to media coverage.
Something amazing happened during this whole process, I got intrigued with the whole mapping world saw it's use and curating maps became a hobby. There were a lot of roads whose specifications were't right, a lot of roads had official names that no one knew in day to day use. Places that were categorized differently than they should've been etc. And I began in falling in love curating these and seeing immediate impacts of those changes like searching for keyword of a place you edited sometime ago and is published, and then searching for the new category and finding out that place appeared gave me a feeling as if I was part of something big. I added a lot of places, updated a lot of roads etc. as the adaption of smart phones went up and the use of google maps increased in Tier-2 city as mine, I realized the immense value this could bring to the society at large. This feeling only cemented stronger when I had to move to a city in north eastern India called Agartala and it made me realize how important it was for all of us to share the information we have about our cities so that anyone who's travelling there could use the tools to actually find the information they need to make themselves comfortable in the new city.
Fast forward to today, and in just 4 years we're at a stage where you can literally travel independently in any other part of the world where you may or may not have traveled before, entire bunch of services like Uber, Ola, Swiggy are built and operate on the back of Google Maps and it's incredible what we local guides along with google have been able to accomplish. Search a place? Decide which is better? Wanna see how is the ambiance? What is everyone saying about the place? How long would it take to get there? What options do I have to get there? Answers to each of these questions comes out from the detailed curation efforts that the local guides put in and the intelligent processing that google manages to do.
The pride in knowing that you're a part of something so big just can't be replaced by anything else.
The question we need to ask is how is this going to evolve forward?
Cheers!
Durgesh
2022
