Pakistan Digital Authority Chairman Dr. Sohail Munir has held a meeting with Major General Kamal Azfar at the Office of the Survey General of Pakistan in Rawalpindi, initiating what the authority describes as an early but important conversation toward establishing a national framework for geospatial data governance. The discussion centred on shaping a coordinated national approach to how geospatial data is collected, standardized, shared, and governed across government institutions, and on advancing the vision for a National Spatial Data Infrastructure for the country.
The Pakistan Digital Authority framed the engagement as foundational rather than peripheral, noting that geospatial data sits at the core of nearly every digital public service, from land records and urban planning to disaster response and precision agriculture. The authority’s position is that getting the governance architecture for spatial data right is not an optional enhancement to Pakistan’s digital transformation agenda but a prerequisite for many of its most consequential digital public services to function effectively. Land record digitization, smart city planning, agricultural productivity monitoring, flood mapping, and emergency response coordination all depend on accurate, interoperable, and accessible spatial data managed under a coherent governance framework.
The Survey of Pakistan, which operates under the Ministry of Defence and has decades of institutional history in mapping, geodesy, and geographic information, brings the kind of technical depth and on-ground experience that makes it a critical partner in any serious National Spatial Data Infrastructure effort. Its role would not be that of a peripheral data provider but of a central institutional pillar in defining standards, building national geodetic reference frameworks, and ensuring that spatial data produced across civilian and military agencies meets interoperability requirements. The meeting between the Pakistan Digital Authority and the Survey General signals that the authority is approaching the National Spatial Data Infrastructure as a genuinely cross-institutional undertaking rather than a standalone digitization project, recognizing that durable geospatial governance in Pakistan will require alignment between the authority’s mandate under the Digital Nation Pakistan Act and the institutional expertise that organizations like the Survey of Pakistan have accumulated over generations.
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