For a country with a rather organic sense of direction, with livestock sharing landmark duties with constantly metamorphosing shops and stalls, a call to map is perhaps as necessary as it is daunting. In 2013, Google, in a bid to shepherd lost souls back on the straight and narrow while, no doubt, carving out a nice new slice of advertising pie for itself, launched Mapathon, a contest that invited users to map local hospitals, eateries and places of worship. Crowdsourcing map-making, especially in a landscape that evolves as frequently as in India, seemed like a win-win: users get to participate in charting their surroundings, Google builds a better product more cheaply and efficiently than if it went it alone, and the unsuspecting Google Maps consumer turns left when told and, voila, arrives at her intended destination.
But the CBI, egged on by the Survey of India, would apparently rather that Indians flounder around or employ the time-honoured tradition of flagging down the nearest passer-by. It has launched a preliminary inquiry against Google for holding the Mapathon without seeking permission from the surveyor general who, under the National Map Policy, 2005, has “the responsibility for producing, maintaining and disseminating the topographic map database of the whole country”. Not only that, Google has allegedly jeopardised national security, they say, by mapping “sensitive areas” and “defence installations”.
