Methodology for establishing demographic, development and environmental geospatial data surveillance platform in the context of a resource constrained environment: lessons from SOMAARTH DDESS, Palwal (India) (Preprint)
Authors: Dixit Shikha , Arora Narendra K , Rahman Atiqur , Howard Natasha J , Singh Rakesh K , Vaswani Mayur , Das Manoja K , Ahmed Faruqueuddin , Mathur Prashant , Tandon Nikhil , Dasgupta Rajib , Chaturvedi Sanjay , Jethwaney Jaishri , Dalpath Suresh , Prashad Rajendra , Kumar Rakesh , Gupta Rakesh , Dube Laurette , Daniel Mark 
Published: March 2018

BACKGROUND

Inadequate administrative health data, sub-optimal public health infrastructure, rapid and unplanned urbanization,environmental degradation and poor penetration of information technology make the tracking of health and well being of the populations within developing countries more challenging. This necessitates setting-up comprehensive surveillance platforms integrated with the information technologies that can cater to the full spectrum of the public health problems.

OBJECTIVE

This manuscript aims to provide methodological insights on establishing GIS integrated comprehensive surveillance platform in resource constrained rural settings.

METHODS

The INCLEN (International Clinical Epidemiology Network) Trust International established a comprehensive SOMAARTH Demographic, Development and Environmental Surveillance Site (DDESS) in a northern Indian rural setting. The surveillance platform evolved through adopting four major steps: 1) site preparation 2) data construction 3) data quality assurance 4) data update and maintenance system. Arc GIS 10.3 and QGIS 2.14 software were employed for geo-spatial data construction. Surveillance data architecture was built upon the geo-referenced land parcel data sets. The composition data pertaining to the land use (residential, non-residential, and vacant), water bodies, roads, railways, community trails, landmarks, water, sanitation and food environment, weather and air quality, demographic characteristics were constructed in relational manner within the surveillance platform.

RESULTS

A comprehensive surveillance platform encompassing 0.2 million population residing in 51 villages over a land mass of 251.7 sq. Km having 32,662 households and 19,260 nonresidential features (cattle shed, shops, health, education, banking, religious institutions etc.) is established. The processes adopted for subdivision of villages into sectors helped in developing geo-referenced location identification system in a setting where no postal addresses or postal codes system were in place. Also the socially and economically homogeneous community clusters (78% of 676 sectors) which usually hide within the village aggregates were disclosed. Characterization and storage of variety of data sets critical for health and epidemiology and generation of new information e.g. water, sanitation and hygiene through geo-analytics were demonstrated. Settlement pattern was compact to the extent that 80% of habitation was concentrated in 9% of the total village area. Community involvement proved helpful in the ground-truthing of the data sets for ascertaining the level of positional, temporal and attribute accuracies and identification of small habitations, missing in the official records.

CONCLUSIONS

SOMAARTH experience allowed characterization and monitoring of wide range of attributes from demography, development, and environmental domains and developed geospatial inter-phase to explore and explain their dynamic relationships, associations and pathways across multiple levels i.e. individual, household, neighborhood, and village. The methodology takes care of the common challenges faced while building information system in the developing countries. However generalizability and scalability needs to be tested in other resource constrained settings as well.