According to a Corporation official, a separate DGPS base station has been planned at the civic body headquarters, the Ripon Building, to carry out global positioning of the utilities. “We have already prepared a base map for Chennai and have started positioning the existing utilities using GPS technology. However, creating new utilities is an incremental process and we need to map (geo-tag) them as well periodically. For that, the Corporation should have its own equipment and base station,” the official said.

 The official explained that the base map was created and the utilities were mapped by using a contracted service. The new proposal, he added, is to have an own DGPS system for future use. The civic body will also geo-tag new buildings across the city that would help in collecting property taxes. Under the initiative, existing civic utilities have been mapped with exact geographic coordinates along with photographs. The civic body has already decided to procure equipment for the base station and survey equipment at a cost of around Rs 4 crore.

 The Corporation has its Google Maps-like smartphone application for officials, who have been given rights to geo-tag the utilities apart from monitoring maintenance works. The civic body is mulling to release its GPS application to the public so that residents could also monitor the maintenance of utilities.However, a final decision is yet to be taken.

 Using the existing base map and available data, the Corporation had launched a waterbodies management system, and had also identified more than 1.55 lakh buildings that were under-assessed for property tax.