Recently the Indian Space Research Organisation launched a purported competitor to google called Bhuvan(http://bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in). To all of us Indians it appears to be a proud maturation of our space program. India now has among the largest constellation of remote sensing satellites launched by a single entity and the resolution of the satellites has increased rapidly. However red tape continues to bog the effort to market the images. For instance the Indian government started making noises about google earth when it started offering high resolution images for free especially of high security areas. I believe that the efforts for offering Bhuvan are in response to this market. I do believe that ISRO wants to genuinely market its satellite imagery to the world through Bhuvan. I do hope I am just being paranoid about this, but it could also be an effort to control the extent of satellite imagery people in India have. The Indian government could at a later date block Google Earth and allow only imagery from Bhuvan to be used for the Indian market that needs such free imagery. I have strong feelings about this after seeing this image from my home town:
Believe it or not this is pretty much the highest resolution I could get! So I am just gonna pretend that this is like the “Alpha version” or something(they call it bhuvan beta) coz only remote sensing scientists can make out the stuff in this pic.I barely found my city coz the labels of the cities are hidden pushpins whose name appears only if u click!So for now I’m sticking to Google Earth. ISRO u better release those High resolution images of civilian areas for free if u plan to have any credibility in the Indian market as well as abroad. Sure u can make money out of images of even higher resolution but we need to be able to make out the houses atleast.