ITANAGAR, 24 Jul: Chief Minister Pema Khandu has expressed optimism that augmentation of services under the North Eastern Space Applications Centre (NESAC) would play a major role in rapid development of the state.
The chief minister said this during a NESAC meeting in Shillong, Meghalaya, on Saturday, which was chaired by union Home Minister Amit Shah.
Khandu said that adoption of space technology in the state would immensely help in the planning process and would help in planning for food and agriculture, communications, disaster risk mitigation, natural resource management and poverty reduction.
He informed that Arunachal has worked intensively with the NESAC on various important projects and identified eight projects in March, out of which reports on three projects have already been submitted.
“These projects include identification of areas suitable for kiwi and walnut plantation in three model smart villages near the international border, identification of degraded forests for undertaking afforestation activities, GIS-based identification of alignment for border fencing with Myanmar in Longding district, and such others,” the chief minister said.
He also informed that the government of Arunachal has “developed an ambitious pipeline of 38 projects to be taken up in three years, covering areas such as water resources, agriculture, disaster management, environment and forests, HRD, development planning and monitoring, etc.”
The total expenditure on these projects will be Rs 18.3 crores, out of which the state will contribute Rs 13.8 crores, he informed.
“With this, we begin the era of integrating space technology in the planning, execution and monitoring process at all levels of governance. We are investing on capacity building of governance machinery to adopt space technology. We also propose to use this technology for town planning, tourism development and effective implementation of telemedicine and e-education through satellite-based communication system,” he said.
Stating that the NESAC would emerge as “a guide converging resources of all state remote sensing application centres for the rapid development of the region,” Khandu said that the Arunachal Pradesh State Research Sensing Application Centre and the NESAC may sign an MoU for enhanced collaboration in space technology application in the development process.
