A campus at Umiam run jointly by two bodies: how space data reaches the North Eastern Region

Background

Hill terrain, heavy rain and thin road access make the north-eastern States a hard place to plan for, and satellite data is one of the few tools that works at that scale. The North Eastern Space Applications Centre was created for exactly that purpose, and it stands at Umiam in the Ri Bhoi district of Meghalaya, near Shillong. It is run as a joint initiative of the Department of Space and the North Eastern Council, so both the space establishment and the regional development body own it. Its mandate is to build high-technology infrastructure that can act as a catalyst for the region's development. The centre is the nodal point for major programmes, national as well as regional, that cover natural resources, the planning of infrastructure, health care, schooling, emergency communication and early warnings for disaster work, and it carries out atmospheric science research too. It works with the State Remote Sensing Application Centres of the region rather than around them. Its projects have been taken up under the Earth Observation Applications Mission, the space agency's geo-sphere biosphere programme, satellite communications, support for disaster management, and space science.