Notified maps from the Gazettes of India

[Arun Ganesh]

The digitized Gazettes of India from JaiGyan collection on internet archive is an incredible resource for anyone interested in notified maps that can be used for legal purposes.

There are plenty of maps and tables of coordinates within the Gazettes that are incredibly powerful public information, but they need to be parsed out to make them more accessible open data.

For now have been able to figure out Gazette filters for a few types of maps of interest:

• Maps of Eco Sensitive Buffer Zones around National Parks/WLS (1,000+ maps). These are important areas within which activities industries causing pollution and mining are banned 
  
• Boundary descriptions (4,000+ Tables).  These are geographic areas described by either a table of plots identified by survey numbers or geographic coordinates demarcating a notified area like a forest, land acquisition etc

Extracting data out of this is a tricky problem since the Gazettes are all originally in PDFs and lack any georeferencing data, so its a long way away from being readily usable

If anyone is interested to automate any part of this for data extraction, there is some ongoing discussion here the you are invited to join: https://github.com/publicmap/amche-atlas/issues/230