KOCHI: As the digital map of Kerala in which boundaries and other geographic details of the local bodies in the state are not available online, the Open Streetmap Kerala Community (OSM Kerala) has completed a mapping system.
At present, there are 1,201 local governments in the state, which include 942 grama panchayats, 152 block panchayats, 14 district panchayats, 87 municipalities and six municipal corporations. The boundaries and other details of these local bodies are now available at openstreetmap.org, the web portal.
The Open Streetmap Kerala has come up with the idea after realising that there are no authentic digital maps of local bodies available. Such maps will be useful while demarcating boundaries of hotspots at the time of the pandemic.
It took almost four months for a mapper from Germany, Heinz Veith and his colleagues Naveen Francis and Manoj Karingamadathil to complete the proceedings. The map was drawn by Heiz with the help of PDF documents on Kerala which are available on the internet.
Ahead of polls
The OSM has also initiated the ward/division-based mapping process in the wake of the upcoming local body polls. The vector maps of each local body will be linked to the details of the local bodies available in Wikipedia.