ISRO’s Bhuvan problems

ISRO’s Bhuvan no where near Goolgle Earth

The much hyped desi avatar of Google Earth has not got down well with few people. Though it was predicted that it will be far better than Google Earth but its shortcomings prevents many people to use it.

Here are some problem areas that are keeping some people away from Bhuvan:

• Bhuvan supports only Windows and IE6 and above. The users have to download a plug-in and create an account. It only runs in the browser whereas Google Earth is a Desktop application.

• The site has poor performance as it often hangs. It was not accessible easily when it was launched and still creates problems. Rendering of the layers has been one more problem with it. The rendering of state, districts etc. are uneven or they are not at all rendered. The navigation panel too was not loaded routinely.

• It was promised that the detailing would be as good as 10 meters from the ground (far better than Google Earth where it is 200 meters) but it turned out to be fake as the loaded images were not so much detailed.

• The Search feature does not seem to work when multiple results are returned.

• The access to weather data of various places is poor too. You can get some basic information about a place such as population.

• There is no provision for users to edit data for a given location.

We hope that ISRO will fix many of such bugs in future if it wants Bhuvan to an alternative to various mapping facilities available today especially Google Earth