Good Samaritan: Sanyam Jain marks Google Maps with the help of his Nokia GPS-enabled phone in Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh. On such expeditions, he carries printouts of satellite photos, and with his mobile phone rapidly flicks through the extant maps to spot gaps that need filling in. Harikrishna Katragadda / Mint
In the last two months, Katragadda’s team has observed a social aspect to map making. “People are collaborating, coming together, to build these maps,” he says, resulting in distinct, strong surges of mapping—“thousands” of spikes of such concentrated activity every week. The armchair cartographers include people such as Sunny Kapoor, a Sadar Bazaar shopkeeper in New Delhi. “When I started working on it, the main roads and the Ring Road were already done, but the smaller roads were all totally wrong,” Kapoor says. Working two or three nights a week, Kapoor drew on his own knowledge to tweak and modify, until the map had it right.
In Bangalore, Rakesh Goel, a project manager at Wipro Technologies by day, became a map maker by night after GPS (Global Positioning System) led him down dead-end and non-existent roads during a drive to Ooty. “The Google Map of Bangalore is better than most others, but it still isn’t fully accurate,” Goel says. “For instance, on my route to work, the map shows a regular road where there is in fact a side-ramp near a flyover.”
Goel works particularly hard on maps of villages and other remote areas, and he’s planning full-fledged mapping vacations to Ooty and Goa. “Even if I map the areas I pass through, that will be useful,” he says. At work, he’s online almost all day, and Google Map Maker serves as a brief refuge. “When I need a break or a distraction, I log on and map a little.”
Jain, a 26-year-old graphic designer and the head of his own design shop, was first drawn to Map Maker because of Sim City, a cherished video game that involves creating functional cities from nothing. “Somehow, this activity reminds me of Sim City,” he says.
But Jain also harks back to driving holidays with his father, when he was much younger. “We’d go to a country, say Switzerland, and he would want to drive everywhere,” he says. “So we’d rent a car, and I’d be assigned the role of navigator.” From all that poring over maps came his current obsession.
Appropriately enough, Jain has a fabulous sense of direction. In the middle of the Knowledge Park, talking voluminously and earnestly about the Greater Noida area, he whips out bearings with the effortlessness of a conjurer pulling silk scarves from his sleeve. “That way lies Dadri. And over there is the Hindon River, which I was the first to label. And that way was an overland drainage pipe, which I followed and traced out on the map.”
When he first started work on the maps of Greater Noida, Jain faced a veritable tabula rasa. “The satellite photos of the area were all in place, but the maps were really blank,” he says. “I had to start with tracing roads, marking out water bodies, that kind of basic thing.”
Greater Noida posed a unique set of challenges. “For one thing, everything here looks the same,” Jain says, with a grin. “The road systems are more complex. The medians are wide, so you need arrows to indicate traffic direction. Then there are the service lanes and the bus lanes—all those need to be traced individually.”
Within the larger Indian context lies a proportionately larger challenge. Since the number of people with ample Internet time to spare is so much smaller than in the US or Europe, and since they are concentrated in tight urban singularities, many areas run the risk of just never being mapped.
Unless, that is, they happen to catch the eyes of people such as Jain.