A Forestry Mobile App for Forest Rights Act (FRA) survey at Rayagada was launched to help both the revenue and forest Departments for identification and demarcation of the beneficiary’s land through mobile in an easy and timely manner through GIS technology.
Keeping undivided Koraput as focus of tribal development, the FRA App was launched at Rayagada which will be utilised in a big way for people to save forest and environment.
Chief Conservator of Forests(GIS and IT), Forest Headquarters, Bhubaneswar, P K Mallick who earlier officiated as DFO, Rayagada, inaugurated it.
DFO Debarchan Behera, ACFs PK Bhatra, Alekh Samal, Sub-collector Prabir Nayak, Range Officer , Prabhakar Senapati, among others were present.
Entire Rayagada district comes under Schedule-V and is covered under FRA. According to the statistics of achievement of implementation of the FRA in Rayagada, there are 2,469 villages in the district where FRCs have been constituted.
When issue of land comes to the forefront, tribals give less priority to issues like health, education, employment and Government entitlements, etc. Thousands of acres of forest land have been distributed under the Act. But one of the major challenges of the Forest Department is to delineate the boundary of the areas of the beneficiary given through Forest Right Act and monitor the development projects taken on them.
Fortunately enough to tackle this challenge, the Forest Department is in the process of using a massive geospatial and IT initiative. At present, it monitors forest patrol performed by its ground force using mobile devices and specialized PDAs (Personal Digital Assistance). All these data captured by the devices are geospatially validated by an enterprise class Geographical Information Systems(GIS) server and used to monitor the forest health.
The GIS is a suite of software tools for mapping and analyzing data which is georeferenced (assigned a specific location on the surface of the earth, otherwise known as geospatial data). Similarly there are a host of other mobile and PDA applications like Incident Reporting, Asset Mapping, Forest Fire Monitoring, Forest Survey, Inspection of Departmental work, Survey of Forest Right Titles of the tribals.
All this mobile base monitoring is operational in most inaccessible areas where there is no internet connectivity also. The application is so designed by the Forest Department that only one needs internet connection at the time of data sync to the server. Even the Forest Department monitors the attendance of the staff in remote locations and the monitoring of the all departmental works are undertaken by the ground force and the data is utilised by the administration at division, circle and State level. The adaption of the technology is very encouraging in Rayagada Forest Division.
The forest headquarter oversees response of ground force in control of forest fire incidence. The fire incidence message instantly sent to the mobile device of the ground force for immediate control and entire process is automated by the GIS servers. It is the only department which is using mobile devices for monitoring different forestry operations at ground level.