Village information system – A case study of Muklan village, Hisar, Haryana (India)

The decision makers along with planners, policy makers and administrators feel helpless while planning the natural and social wealth of a region, in the absence of accurate information about all kinds of resources at village level. On the other hand planning is now widely accepted as a way to handle complex problems of resource allocation and decision making. For the purpose both spatial and non-spatial data is required. Remote sensing and GIS serves as a powerful tool for storage, handling, retrieving and analysis of spatially correlated data. A suitable information system is required at village level to serve all these requirements. Such information system can provide a more effective and meaningful direction to the planning and development of rural settlements. In this study, high resolution images from Google Earth server has been used for the preparation of large scale base map of Muklan village, Hisar district, Haryana at scale 1:3000 in GIS environment, supported with extensive field survey. Data related to different aspects like population and household size, landuse, type of housing, electricity, telephone facility, sanitation facility, vehicles, water facility, accessibility to water and occupation of the households is collected during field survey. This information is integrated with large scale base map and has been used to develop an information system in HTML environment. The online access to the information will be useful to assess the status of infrastructure facilities and social characteristics of Muklan village which is accessible using www.muklan.webstarts.com/index.htm web address.