ISLAMABAD: The Capital Development Authority’s (CDA) Development Working Party (DWP) on Saturday approved a project worth around Rs800 million for upgrading planning wing of the civic agency.

The CDA-DWP meeting, which was held here with CDA Chairman Amer Ali Ahmed in the chair, approved PC-I of the project.

The project titled ‘Establishment of Geo Spatial Technology Wing’ worth Rs796 million, will be completed in 36 months.

According to a working paper, the project was aimed at shifting planning wing from conventional method of planning to information technology based systems.

It said that objective of the project is to enhance the IT infrastructure and hiring of skilled IT professionals by CDA, which in turn will sustain and improve the overall IT services of its officials and provide the IT-based e-services to citizens of Islamabad.

This will also play a role in adaptation of latest and future technologies in service provisioning.

The working paper further said project would establish a Planning and Geo-Spatial Technology Wing within CDA premises, which would benefit from the application of remote sensing and GIS technologies as a major step in moving from e-governance towards g-governance. High-resolution satellite imagery of 0.5/0.3 metre along with aerial imagery of specified areas (as per the requirement of CDA) will be acquired by Suparco on a quarterly basis over the project timeline of three years. The imagery will be used for mapping of ICT, land cover classification mapping, temporal analysis of development progress, etc. All the geospatial datasets will be used to aid and provide technical inputs for designing, modification and finalisation of ICT master plan.

The working paper said that under this project a unified web-based platform will be developed keeping in view the possible requirements of CDA by incorporating comprehensive vector datasets along with the integration of CDA non-spatial datasets to reflect in the spatial context.

Published in Dawn, May 8th, 2022