Srinagar: The School Education Department has completed the much-awaited Geospatial Information System (GIS) mapping of all the government and private schools in J&K.
The GIS mapping was done to identify the geographical locations of all the existing schools and establish new schools in un-served areas as per the availability of schools in the adjacent areas.
As per the official document, besides completing GIS mapping of schools, the government has established a GIS portal www.gisportaljk.com which was e-inaugurated by the Lieutenant Governor earlier here.
“The GIS mapping of schools was done with the objective to have geographical locations of educational institutions and identification of unserved habitations across J&K,” the official document reads.
The GIS is one of the most important contributions of modern technologies and serves a prospective and powerful visual dimension to data through maps facilitating communication and discourse among different stakeholders.
GIS tools enable to create theme-based or thematic maps based on data stored in a database or data set.
This data can be linked to a number of ways such as location of a school, hospital building, mosque and other institutions.
“GIS mapping allows the user to visualize and analyze spatial information in innovative manner that reveals previously hidden relationships, patterns and trends,” an official said.
In the School Education Department, GIS mapping of schools helps in displaying different grades of schools within a given radius and to be used as an MIS tool for viewing infrastructure and enrollment details of the institutions besides the ICT and smart classroom, vocational laboratories and resource rooms.
The GIS mapping of schools was done after a delay of more than three years. There were various technical glitches and other issues due to which the GIS mapping of schools was not carried out by the department.
However, the process has been completed recently.
This newspaper has earlier reported that the J&K government will now get new government-run primary and upper primary schools only on the basis of Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping of all existing schools.
The erstwhile Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) had also asked the J&K government to complete the GIS mapping of all the schools and the school-less habitations across J&K.
“Now onwards, the construction of new schools under the Samagra Shiksha (erstwhile SSA) will be decided only on the basis of GIS mapping in order to ensure distribution of schools properly on the basis of requirement,” the official said.
GIS mapping is an initiative of the department of School Education and Literacy, MHRD, for seamless visualisation of school locations across the country.
As per the standing norms of the government, a primary school should be available at a distance of every kilometer and a middle school at every 3 km while a high school at every 5 km.
But in J&K, the successive regimes established educational institutions haphazardly without taking into consideration the distance between the institutions.
“This is the reason behind making GIS mapping of government schools a mandatory exercise,” the official said.