Under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), data of over 7 lakh geo-tagged facilities at the habitation level were recently released by the government. Three major facilities namely Market facilities, Educational facilities & Medical facilities were mapped under this exercise. The Pradan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) was launched in December 2000 as a one-time special intervention to provide rural connectivity by constructing all-weather roads to unconnected habitations with the prescribed population. Road connectivity is a pivotal facilitator of growth and enables the achievement of many developmental goals. The first and second phase of the government’s flagship rural road development scheme focused on construction and upgradation of rural roads respectively. In 2019, the Central government approved the implementation of Phase III of the programme under which it aims to consolidate 1.25 Lakh kilometres of existing Rural Road Network and the upgradation ‘through routes’ and ‘major rural links’ that connect habitations to The government has identified the three mentioned critical facilities as pivotal. Priority will be given to identifying and upgrading routes and links to connect the agriculture warehouses, government hospitals, and educational institutions. This would enable easy and faster movement to and from food processing centers, provide affordable and easy access to schools and medical facilities, which are necessary for the socio-economic development of a region. GIS mapping of critical facilities has been conducted for identification of routes under PMGSY In order to select candidate routes and identifying Major Rural Links/Through Routes, routes connecting each habitation in a Block to the nearest mandi/school/health facility would be traced and those which are common to many habitations will be identified by the States as candidate roads. As per the guidelines, this exercise is to be carried out preferably through GIS or manually. The exercise is useful for planning relevant investments. Data of over 7 lakh geo-tagged facilities was opened by government recently Recently, the data of about 7 lakh geo-tagged rural facilities across India under PMGSY was opened for public use. In other words, PMGSY released the data for anyone to freely use, re-use, or share the data provided it is attributed to the provider, and license as per Government of India’s Open Data License. The release of such a large GIS dataset is an important step forward as it helps in enhancing transparency. Such data is also important in planning and encourages public participation. Such data can be combined with other existing data for further research. The data is available up to the habitation level in each state (data for some states is not completely available) and includes names of the facility, habitation name, address, category (such as transport or education), sub-category (such as Bank or High School), and its geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude). The list of facilities covered under the survey is given in the table below. OMMAS software is being used for monitoring the implementation of PMGSY OMMAS or the Online Management Monitoring and Accounting System is the web-based software being used for the implementation of PMGSY. The website provides the details of fund releases, fund utilization, the status of work progress, etc. and is available in the public domain. The geo-spatial data of facilities opened recently can be readily downloaded for each state from OMMAS. Of the data of over 7.71 lakh facilities, 1.53 lakh are Agro facilities, 1.7 lakh are educational institutions, over 88,500 are medical facilities. More than 3.58 lakh facilities are transport/admin related facilities. Definition of facilities is not standardized The data collection began in 2019 and is still in progress in some states like Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and certain other north eastern states. Meanwhile, data for Goa and most union territories is unavailable since they are yet to be integrated into the scheme. The data was collected by government rural engineers at the block level using a common android application. However, no prior centralized training or SOP was issued as a result of which there can be variations in collected data since the interpretation of the term facilities under each category is left to the persons collecting the data. For instance, some states may have included private facilities on the list. The case may be that some states may not have considered weekly markets while collating the data on agro facilities, which is also critical in rural areas. But the facilities under education such as High Schools, recorded across the country need not be highly variant.