Telangana To Be First To Get Google Street View

The Telangana delegation led by Information Technology Minister K Taraka Rama Rao met with the Google Street View team of Manik Gupta, Director of Product Management, and Narayana Tummala, Ground Truth Engineering Lead, of Google.

While Street View is extensively used in USA, Canada and many European countries, its applications in India has been limited so far. Google has launched Street View primarily in some tourist sites like Taj Mahal and Qutub Minar in partnership with the Archaeological Society of India. The company is in talks with the Ministry of Home affairs to get permissions for conducting the Street View exercise at a city-wide level. This permission is expected to be given shortly.

Upon the request made by KTR, Google agreed to make Telangana the first state which will get Street View for one complete city (Hyderabad) to begin with, with subsequent extension to other major cities and towns in the state.

Google has also agreed to support specific requests made by the Minister to help the state utilize Street View for monitoring deviations from approved building plans, property tax collection, and mapping of industrial land banks located in different parts of the state, to name a few.

Getting this important commitment from Google Street View - to use Telangana for piloting all its major initiatives in the country - is seen as a major achievement for the state.

The delegation led by the IT Minister also briefed the Google team about the Water grid project and how the same duct lines were going to be utilized to provide fiber optic cables to every household. Google has embarked on a similar project called Google Fiber, which is been piloted in eight cities in the USA including Kansas City. Google has agreed to study the Telangana model in detail through their country team in India and explore the possibility of contributing to this project. (INN)