A few weeks ago we began a HMP (humanitarian mapping project) in the Uttarakhand state of northern India, along the border with Nepal. There was a good response from our HOT volunteers and we were able to rapidly map several towns as well as a lot of connecting roads to smaller villages in the mountains.
Although HOT responded quickly and as best we could given the limited information we had to work with, we did not have good communications with other aid organizations as to how the data could be used. Since we were afraid the data might not get used, a decision was made to shift focus away from India to other HMPs where the data could be better put to use by those in the field. Since then however, we have been contacted by DHN who passed us a request from SEEDS and MapAction. They have identified four districts in the region which are where they hope to send ground teams and they have asked us to help so we have decided to try to shift focus back to this region, now that we have clearer goals and some indication the map data will be used by ground teams. The four districts are thought to contain about 4000 villages, and the current priority is to map the "connecting" roads which allow travel from one village to the next, as well as getting the village names on the map. Details in the villages themselves are of less concern, as the primary focus is currently just getting food, water, and other aid to the people in these villages who have been cutoff from the rest of the country by the flooding and landslides making some roads impassible. Pierre has put together a uMap showing the four affected districts. We think the best start is to work on the connecting roads and names from GNS (I am putting together the GNS file now and hope to have it posted to the list in a few hours). Villages along rivers in the valleys are likely to be worst hit, and the greatest damage seems to be roughly in the middle of these 4 districts so I suggest we start in that general area and work outwards. The OpenCycleMap layer shows the elevation contours for the area and this is a good thing to check against bing to see where to focus your efforts, but for the most part, any rural village connecting road is usedul. Since some roads have been rendered impassable having multiple routes to a given village is important. Here is the link to the uMap showing the area of interest: http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/fr/map/uttarakhand-june-2013-flood-openstreetmap-contribu_724#8/ 30.392/79.310 Hopefully this time around we will have better communication and can get more detailed info as the HMP progresses. -AndrewBuck
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