Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal launched the national GIS-enabled land bank system, which will help investors to get real-time information about the availability of industrial land and resources.

Highlights of the system

This is a prototype and will be developed further with inputs from states to make it an effective and transparent mechanism for land identification as well as procurement.

With this, potential investors would be able to locate and identify the land from their distant offices and finalise the location of industries without frequently visiting the offices of land owning agencies. 

The system is being developed by integrating the Industrial Information System (IIS) with state GIS (Geographic Information System).

The project was launched for six states. Goyal expressed confidence that other states/UTs will join by December 2020.

Industrial Information System

To optimise resource utilisation and enhance the efficiency of the manufacturing sector, the Department for Promotion of Industry & Internal Trade launched the Industrial Information System (IIS) in 2017. 

It is a GIS-enabled database of industrial areas and clusters across the country. 

The portal serves as a one-stop solution to the free and easy accessibility of all industrial information including availability of raw material, agriculture, horticulture, minerals, natural resources, distance from key logistic nodes, layers of terrain and urban infrastructure.

More than 3,300 industrial parks across 31 states/UTs covering about 4,75,000 hectare land have been mapped on the system. 

The information available includes forest, drainage, raw material heat maps (agricultural, horticulture, mineral layers) and multiple layers of connectivity.

The initiative is being supported by Invest India, National Center of Geo-Informatics (NCoG), National e-Governance Division (NeGD), ministry of electronics and information technology and Bhaskaracharya Institute for Space Applications and Geo-Informatics (BISAG).

IIS aims to provide:

* Information on available land for prospective investors looking at setting up units in the country. 

* GIS mapping of industrial clusters.

* The system also holds the information about the existing external and internal infrastructure such as rail, road, air and port connectivity and other common facilities in and around the manufacturing clusters. 

* Links to state GIS portals and state land banks.

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