High-resolution satellite imaging, broadband links and cheap, powerful computers have left no cartographic secrets to be uncovered. Take Google Earth, for instance, a website that allows users access to a detailed photographic map of the world. This virtual globe even gives information about the elevations of mountains and valleys. The entire planet is covered — with about one-third of all land depicted in such detail that individual cars (even their number-plates), trees, and the homes of 3 billion people can be seen. Ten cities are added every month so that in the next few years nearly all major cities in the world would be included.

There are other ‘geobrowsers’ too and between them the whole world would be mapped in the minutest detail. It is against this backdrop we have to see the anachronistic requirements for the reproduction of Indian maps in books and periodicals. Under existing copyright laws, any map of India, and this includes historical maps dating back to Vedic times, has to be cleared by the Survey of India, failing which the publication can be confiscated. The Survey of India checks the “authenticity” of external boundaries vis-à-vis Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and the coastal boundaries that includes all the islands on the Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. This is an expensive and time consuming process.

However, because of repeated requests from publishers to simplify the checking procedures, the survey has made a small change: you can reproduce maps of India if you use outline maps provided by the survey. But these maps cannot be traced or reproduced photographically because the survey thinks that some distortion of boundaries takes place while doing this. If these rules are not followed, then the publisher or distributor has to add a disclaimer stating that the maps does not represent the authentic boundaries of India.

The question that is often asked is whether these regulations are at all necessary with the technological advance in communications and when information is easily available on the internet. The official explanation is that there are “strategic reasons” (going back to the Indo-China border disputes) and therefore some rule has to be enforced. This argument becomes pretty thin when the rule is enforced stringently even for foreign magazines that are of peripheral interest and carry no official stamp of approval.

It is understandable that the government of India publications are required to have authenticated maps, but enforcing the rule same for magazines or school atlases makes little sense. Good quality maps are the casualty of such bureaucratic dealings. Good cartography is impossible to produce on the outline maps provided by the survey because the paper is not good enough. So maps are drawn afresh using computers, but then it takes repeated visits to the survey to get these cleared. No wonder we don’t have a decent atlas of India after 60 years of Independence.