Land Use Land Cover [LULC] Raster for India available through Bhuvan on request

[Craig Dsouza]

Hi,

Since there was discussion around Land Use - Built up areas, people can also see LULC maps Bhuvan makes available for India as both a Web Map Service and in the form of the original raster. They prepare LULC maps for India at a scale of 1:250k annually since 2004-05 and 1:50k (higher resolution) once in every five years (2005-06, 2010-11) The 1:50k maps are available only as a WMS (useful only for visualization), but 1:250k are available as a raster GeoTIFF (which lends itself to analysis). You have to go through a certain procedure and fill out an MoU and mail them a letter explaining your intent, then follow it up with a few phone calls.

See here: http://bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in/gis/thematic/index.php#

I applied for the raster for the Mahanadi River Basin, (80-87E and 19-24N) for all 10 years from 2004-05 to 2013-14, on behalf of the NGO that I work for and they have made it available to us with a single use license (wish it was open access, but this is still better than nothing) As per my understanding they process each request and verify that no areas of concern for national security are within our specified area of interest before making it available.

The classification has the following categories

[Arun Ganesh]

Very interesting Craig. Could you share details of the procedure and the license?

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Arun Ganesh

(planemad)

[Justin Meyers]

Hello,
What contact do you have? I have writen numerous emails with no response (soi, bhuvan, wris, etc). Let's liberate some gis data for India. I have numerous layers for all of India(village, taluk, settlement), but what is the license? This is driving me nuts... can anyone in india help me out? Mapbox people, let's do this!??

[Craig Dsouza]

So on the Bhuvan thematic page (http://bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in/gis/thematic/index.php#)

First create a user id and login

Then under search, Select theme Land Use Land Cover (250k)

Then click on the 'Get Data' tab

- Select the years for which you want the raster

- Select the purpose of use

- Select area of interest (AOI), by administrative unit, bounding box or draw AOI on the map

 Click 'submit request'

Then you get a request id and you have to download an MoU 

Fill out this MoU with your relevant details. (see mine attached)

It basically says that i'm allowed to use it only for the stated purpose i.e. for our research study and cannot copy and share it with anyone else

Justin, yep, I've had the same experience. Emails have not worked, but phone calls help.

For this LULC dataset in particular I waited for two weeks with no reply, then called the office of the deputy director of RS Applications (http://www.nrsc.gov.in/Contact_Us) and provided the request number. They sent me the files that day itself.

Your question is different though. I'm not sure how they would react to you calling them and asking them about licensing.

Perhaps once Thej's paper on the need for open data is ready, we can reach out to them with an official letter and the paper seeking clarification on licensing.