Mapping out a career

Marrying technology with infrastructure projects for optimum results is a way of life for this budding entrepreneur

From building bridges across undulating terrain to soil mapping, providing solutions to forest fires to zeroing on the exact locations for precion farming are a few tasks that Bhaskar and his team work on

T P Venu

“Kerala is heading for a drought in the next 20 years,” says Bhaskar Kannoju with an air of finality while sipping coffee at his office in Banjara Hills. His words are backed by not hearsay, but after analysing 56,000 satellite images that were downloaded in three months by his team. An M Tech in Remote Sensing from JNTU, Bhaskar was into sales for a good nine years before starting his company Adepto Geoinformatics Pvt Ltd in July 2011. A field man to the core he says, “I must have travelled the length and breadth of the country at least 12 times in my career and there is no better experience than that. Today, it is paying me dividends.” With site offices in Shillong, Bihar, Haryana, Pune and Rajasthan and 52 employees from a mere four in 2011, Adepto has come a long way.

So what does Adepto do? The company provides solutions for government organisations and anyone who wants to implement projects right from building bridges across undulating terrain to soil mapping and even decision support for multinational companies to make correct decisions by recommending locations for retail outlets.

“Every department needs information and data is crucial. Digital mapping helps managers take decisions. We provide cutting-edge technological advice as we have alliance with global GIS data and software product developers such as Innovyze, Intergraph, Cisco and IBM,” says Bhaskar. Geographic Information System (GIS) should tough every human being. It has to come into the mainstream. The day is not far away when even a farmer in a remote village gets alerts on cropping pattern through the mobile.

Marrying technology with infrastructure is the core business that Bhaskar and his team are involved in. Scientific applications such as remote sensing, image processing, technical computing, modeling and phogrammetry using state-of-the-art products, his team takes up projects as far as Shillong in the North East to Jaipur in Rajasthan.

Presently, a team is stationed in Rajasthan on a project that would help the government of Rajasthan in zeroing down on every village on a map by getting the minutest information at a click of a button on the water sources in the state.

So what are his future plans and where does he see geospatial industry go from here? Bhaskar is optimistic that the future lies in the technology. He says, “We have so many research institutes in India each one catering to a specific field such as for rice, sorghum etc but the sad thing is there is very little data available with them. Technology can help take decisions and mapping technology is the way out. There is a need for a drought monitoring index and crop mass index.”

Another pet project of Bhaskar is in water infrastructure. There is a great need for modeling, network, design and simulation and real-time connectivity. “There is so much to be done in the realm of agriculture, Oil and Gas, Telecommunication and Forestry and technology has answers to difficult questions,” says Bhaskar.