Srinagar: The High Court has granted the authorities one month’s time for completing the satellite imagery for the Sonamarg tourist destination of central Kashmir.
The orders were passed after perusing status reports filed by the officials including Chief Town Planner and the Town Planning Organization, Kashmir, by a division bench comprising Chief Justice N. Kotiswar Singh and Justice Wasim Sadiq Nargal.
In this context, the Town Planning Organization, Kashmir, has already informed the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Sonamarg Development Authority that it has digitized the Master Plan/Land Use Plan and overlayed it on the procured satellite imagery from NRSC, the court was informed in a report.
“The digitization of land use features building footprints have been done for generating comparative statistics (Draft stage) on category wise land use achieved on the ground with respect to the land use proposed in the Master Plan,” the report said.
The Sonamarg Master Plan 2005-2025 was prepared by the Town Planning Organization Kashmir in AutoCAD software, it was informed. A certain degree of error both in terms of area and location/shift is bound to occur while analysing the plan with that of ground conditions/reality, read the report.
Citing the reason for it, the organisation said “a high precision satellite data/high resolution imagery and GIS mapping was not available during the preparation of the Master Plan. Moreover, it is pertinent to mention that the comparison/study/analysis made cannot be between a non-scalable/non-referenced system with that of referenced/scalable system. Inferences or statistical analysis drawn out of these can be made accurate.”
Its communique further explained that certain features like river body, river front and the roads being dynamic in nature, the area analysis may vary from proposed land use plan with respect to ground conditions.
It added “the exercise is still likely to take a month or so for carrying out the necessary ground validation of the image interpretation and with respect to Master Plan preparation.”
It further informed that after cross-validation of the data, the final report shall be submitted to the High Court.
