Comments on Haq's Musings: Digital Maps---Petaluma to Peshawar and Kashmir

Here's WSJ blog on Indian claims to Kashmir:

OK, so everyone knows that India, like Pakistan, claims the divided region of Kashmir in its entirety.

Everyone also knows that the seven-decade stalemate that has split the Himalayan territory between India- and Pakistan-administered portions is unlikely to change any time soon.

So, why does India get so upset every time a government, company or international body fails on a map of the region, however small, to show India’s territorial claims over the Pakistan-administered portion of Kashmir?
------------
India’s Ministry of External Affairs lamented the “gross inaccuracies” in the map and said it had conveyed its displeasure to the Embassy. The whole of Kashmir is an “integral part” of India, it said, and maps “should depict the boundaries of our country correctly.”

It’s one thing for a customs official insisting on black-penning the Indian version of the border onto a child’s imported globe (yes, this happened.) But for it to reach the level of official, public MEA statements is absurd.

India has become increasingly militant over its cartographic claims. Editions of The Economist magazine, including the current one, have been held up by Indian customs over objections they showed the effective borders in Kashmir rather than only India’s claims.

Why India believes other countries and international publications must show its territorial claims and not the situation on the ground is unclear, and not matched by how map-makers deal with other disputed borders.

Take the 38th Parallel, for instance, the cease-fire line that has divided the Korean peninsula since 1945. Fighting between North and South Korea ended in 1953, but the border has never been formalized. Yet South Korea doesn’t yell publicly when Google Inc.’s maps show the 38th Parallel as the nation’s effective border with North Korea.

When Google did the same thing with India last year, showing its de facto rather than claimed border with Pakistan-administered Kashmir, it caused a furor here. (Google relented and, today, if you access its maps in India, you’ll confusingly see India sharing a border with Afghanistan, which might be India’s claim but is not reality.)

It is now customary to mark a map of Kashmir with dotted lines with labels that say “controlled by Pakistan and claimed by India” and “controlled by India and claimed by Pakistan.” (China controls a part which is claimed by India, but that’s another story.)

But the U.S. State Department map, part of an A-Z of thumbnail sketches of countries with whom America has diplomatic relations, was by no means meant to show this level of detail.

A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi acknowledged there were “inaccuracies” and said the State Department had removed the map. But he added it “was not meant to represent the same precision and intricacies of a scientific map.”

There was much gnashing of teeth in the Indian press. One Times of India report even went so far as to claim these cartographic missteps are starting to anger not only officials but also journalists.

It’s clear that India will have to move beyond this kind of petty griping if it’s going to take the lead in a peace deal with Pakistan, an unstable country that is fast losing the support of the U.S.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has made peace with Pakistan a key plank of his administration, and a settlement on Kashmir will be key.
---------
Brahma Chellaney, an analyst at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, contacted by the Times of India, went as far as to say the map showed a “pro-Pakistan cartographic tilt.”....

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/11/22/are-all-these-maps-really-pro-pakistan/?mod=google_news_blog

Here's an interesting CGAP report on the use of technology to aid Pakistan's flood victims in 2010:

CGAP’s partner in Pakistan, Tameer Microfinance Bank, and their parent company, Telenor Pakistan, have made it possible for people in Pakistan who may not have internet access to make donations to relief organizations using their EasyPaisa mobile banking platform and have removed the usual transfer fees. EasyPaisa account holders can make donations direct from their mobile wallets and anyone can walk into one of 6,000 agents to contribute to the work of organizations including the Pakistan Red Crescent Society and SOS Children’s villages. They are also in discussion with a number of NGOs about using EasyPaisa to help them to distribute payments to people who have lost their homes or their livelihoods and Telenor themselves have pledged over Rs 213 million (USD 2.5 million) to flood relief efforts.

UBL Bank has won a contract from the Government of Pakistan to make electronic payments of Rs 100,000 (USD 1,170) each to 2 million households – the vast majority of whom will never have set foot in a bank. UBL plan to use their Omni Branchless Banking platform to deliver payments to recipients via Visa debit cards. They will open accounts and distribute cards so that recipients can spend their money at stores or withdraw their cash at ATMs or agents that have been specially set up to deal with the post-flood situation. In post-disaster situations, being able to access cash becomes a life or death issue and from the provider perspective it’s also a major challenge. UBL has 1,800 agents at present and they plan to set up 3,000-4,000 more over the next 3-4 months to cope with the increased demand, according to Abrar Mir, Executive Vice-President of Branchless Banking, who hopes that the people that they reach will continue to use their accounts long after the floods have subsided.

Other organizations are using mobile phones in innovative ways that are not related to branchless banking. Ushahidi, an open source project that allows users to crowdsource crisis information via mobile, have set up pakreport.org a mapping service that allows anyone in the country to text information about the flood. Information is collated and made available to the emergency services and disaster response organizations and NGOs via a web-based interface.

The presence of two branchless banking services in Pakistan (EasyPaisa and UBL Omni) may play an important part in the response to the flood in Pakistan. In Haiti, where no branchless banking solutions exist, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID set up a prize for the first organization to launch a branchless banking solution earlier this year that could be used to make payments to those affected by the earthquake. Although there are some encouraging signs, the prize has yet to be claimed. The response in Pakistan has been much faster due to the presence of existing systems.

Disasters are a fact of life in many countries, and disproportionately affect the poor. Branchless banking will never be able to prevent disasters, but it has the potential to dramatically improve the way in which we can respond to them.

Here's an excerpt from a Wired.com report on how Pakistani techies are helped in the flood-relief effort:

One of the biggest problems in flood relief is locating people displaced by the flood who need food, shelter or medicine. So Sohaib Khan, a computer-science professor at the Lahore University of Management Scientists, put together a widget to help. Floodmaps relies on Google Earth and Google Maps to track the path of the flood and monitor devastation like washed-out bridges that need to be rebuilt. His maps page provides detailed views of over 9000 villages affected by the downpour, broken down by region.

The primary customer for Khan’s maps are non-governmental organizations at work in Pakistan. “Our goal is to get as much data out there as possible,” he says. “We are now working with other NGOs to help them with their mapping needs, both for the current phase as well as planning for the upcoming rehabilitation phase.” But it’s not just independent aid groups that have made use of Floodmaps. The Punjab government’s detailed flood-relief website runs Floodmaps on its mapping page.

Khan’s website makes it easy to get one of his widgets: Just file a request through a provided form and receive a Floodmap. But that’s about as far as his efforts go in terms of social media. The maps themselves track data provided by affiliated aid groups about broken dams, damaged roads and other affected infrastructure. But those groups — or citizens themselves — can’t adjust the maps themselves. “We have not yet really exploited crowdsourcing,” Khan says.

That falls to a group called PakReport, an impromptu collection of Pakistani technologists and their mostly-American academic friends. PakReport is a donor-supported SMS effort that allows people affected by the flood to send in their location and a message about their need. Using a mapping tool called Ushahidi, flood-stricken Pakistanis can find their emergency information tracked by type and location, giving official and independent aid agencies a view into the evolving landscape of people’s needs. Text to 3441 and help create a distributed database of crisis information.

It seems the Kashmir Google maps wars are still ra...

2011-02-12T11:15:42.619-08:00

It seems the Kashmir Google maps wars are still raging between India and Pakistan. Here's a Times of India report from Aug 2010:

NEW DELHI: The search engine Google has amended its maps to show the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir as part of India.

The correction came in response to the notice issued by minister of state for communications and IT Sachin Pilot to Google Inc for showing Pakistan-occupied Kashmir as part of the neighbouring country.

After Pilot noticed the lapse, the ministry wrote to the website that maps available through www.google.com/insights showed certain parts of J&K as part of a different country. The notice said that wrongful depiction of Indian map could attract action under Sections 69A and 79 of the IT Act.

Sources said the website had corrected the maps in its memory though a few pages would take some time to upload.

It sets right what is a sensitive issue in the country. The showing of PoK as part of Pakistan had attracted strong comments from various sections.

Here's an interesting excerpt from a piece about the use of technology in Pakistan written for CNET by a visiting Pakistani tech journalist Zamir Haider at Stanford University:

According to the Ministry of Finance's Economic Survey of Pakistan for fiscal 2005-2006, computer use in urban households is high. In comparison with the literacy rate--53 percent--at least 40 percent of Pakistanis are computer literate or have access to computers.

Mostly, these are Pentium II or Pentium III PCs, since laptops are expensive. PCs are now widely available at good prices, thanks to Chinese computers flooding the markets. Most of these machines are not big brands, but they do say "Intel Inside." As for laptops, they come from various brands like Dell, Toshiba, Compaq, Sony and Apple. Wireless Internet connections, on the other hand, are still rare.

Dialing up through the phone lines
In Pakistan, 99 percent of Internet connections are still over phone lines. Wi-Fi is generally seen only at five-star hotels and now at a few restaurants. People at home usually use Internet cards of various denominations starting from 10 rupees per hour (16 cents) to 100 rupees per 10 hours ($1.60). Connection speeds through Internet cards are generally poor.

Getting permanent Internet connections from an Internet service provider is expensive, but most businesses do get connections from these companies.

Mobile phones are the most common form of personal technology seen in Pakistan. Connecting to the Internet through mobile phones is getting popular now, but it probably will still take another a year or more to be as popular as it is here in California.

People here are excited about the coming of the Apple iPhone. That's what I hear people talking about when I go to any of the mobile phone outlets in San Francisco.

In Pakistan, people aren't that much different when it comes to mobile phones. They're fond of buying expensive cell phones not for technology purposes alone, but also largely to show off.

Pakistan has been rated a ‘Rising Star’ in researc...

2009-12-19T12:11:13.267-08:00

Pakistan has been rated a ‘Rising Star’ in research multiple times over the last couple of years by ScienceWatch.com, a Thompson Reuters website which tracks trends and performance in research by analyzing its database of scientific papers and citations. The ‘Rising Star’ rankings are published every two months to acknowledge new entrants, by identifying the scientists, institutions, countries, and journals which have shown the largest percentage increase in total citations. In the May issue of the ratings, Pakistan was named a ‘rising star’ in two areas, ‘Materials Science’ and ‘Plant & Animal Science’. Amongst other countries of the region, Bangladesh was also listed as a rising star in ‘Computer Science’ and ‘Pharmacology & Toxicology’. Iran was named in four categories, and Qatar and UAE in one category each.

This is not the first time that Pakistan has been named in these ratings recently. In fact, Pakistan’s record has been very consistent since March 2008, the earliest ratings that are available on the website. Here’s a listing of Pakistan’s mention in the ‘rising star’ ratings:

* March 2008: Engineering, Mathematics
* May 2008: Materials Science
* July 2008: Engineering
* September 2008: Computer Science, Engineering, Materials Science, Mathematics, Plant and Animal Sciences (5 areas!)
* November 2008: Engineering
* January 2009: Computer Science
* March 2009: Computer Science
* May 2009: Materials Science, Plants and Animal Sciences
* July 2009: None

Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, the country’s top university in terms of the number of publications per year, has also been recognized as a ‘rising star’ institution, in Jan 2009 and July 2008 issues, both times in the area of ‘Engineering’.

The ratings are based on the largest percentage increase and not the absolute numbers, and therefore, cannot be used to quantify research productivity in absolute terms. However, they definitely demonstrate the trend of a substantial increase in international publications from Pakistan compared to previous years. It is very healthy that a number of different areas are covered in these past two years, showing an across the board enhancement of research productivity.

While there has been a lot of debate on the effectiveness of HEC’s reforms in higher education, at least one thing is clear: the increased emphasis on research, largely due to HEC’s programs, has started to bear fruit. These are hard numbers here, based on data by the company that maintains the largest scientific citation index in the world, and cannot be easily refuted by the nay-sayers.

Great post! Informative and btw, keep it up :)

2009-11-25T03:09:33.754-08:00

Great post! Informative and btw, keep it up :)

I am glad there are enough volunteer programmers a...

2009-11-22T07:55:09.287-08:00

I am glad there are enough volunteer programmers and amateur cartographers in Pakistan to attempt to do something about building detailed digital maps and maintain them in their spare time....without the assistance of commercial vendors like Tele Atlas and Navteq who did the same for North America and Europe at huge costs. It shows what the Pakistani people are capable of in the face of institutional failures in Pakistan.

Babar, Thanks. I, too, find your blog very inform...

2009-11-20T09:52:58.447-08:00

Babar,

Thanks. I, too, find your blog very informative.

I visit it once in a while to keep up with telecom related developments in Pakistan.

Good summary article. I also recently wrote about ...

2009-11-20T09:43:24.684-08:00

Good summary article. I also recently wrote about WiMAX coverage maps at http://telecompk.net/2009/11/10/interactive-map-showing-wateens-wimax-coverage/