Sagar Gurung, a senior surveyor with the Survey of India (SoI) in Dehradun, has worked through landslides, 3,000m above mean sea level. Carrying his high-precision levelling instruments weighing over 10kg, apart from a barcoded staff and iron shoe that stabilises it, he has evaded rocks from heights on the Uttarkashi-Gangotri route, all the while praying that bears do not hound his survey party at night. “I have also seen snow leopards while doing my work,” he says. When THE WEEK spoke to him, the 28-year-old was in Port Blair, working on a geoid model project in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
But his most dangerous assignment, recalls Gurung, was in 2018 for the National Mission for Clean Ganga at Jamui district on the Bihar-Jharkhand border. The district sits in the red corridor that sees significant Maoist activity. The CRPF personnel were amazed at the presence of Gurung and his team of field surveyors. They refused to offer any help directly. “But I had to finish my work. I was the team leader and I could not betray any nervousness or cowardice,” says Gurung. He recounts an incident when a Naxal came charging at his team, with an arrow nocked into his bow. “We were six of us, and I was the most vulnerable being the leader,” he says. “I stayed calm and mumbled something like we do not work for the government of India. We had removed the sticker from our vehicles, too. He stared into my eyes for a few seconds, but it seemed like a minute. I have never been more scared in my life.” His local help in the team had all but given up. “He said, ‘Sir, why don’t you just drop out of this? What kind of work is this?’” says Gurung.
The adventures of surveyors make for fascinating thrillers. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Robert Clive, governor of the Bengal, wanted a general map of the areas under his administration. He chose 24-year-old James Rennell for the task. Clive wrote to the Court of Directors, the executive body of the East India Company, around 1767, “We have appointed Captain Rennell, a young man of distinguished merit in this branch, to be Surveyor General, and directed him to form one general chart from those already madeì. This though attended with great labour does not prevent him from prosecuting his own surveys, the fatigue of which, with the desperate wounds he has lately received in one of them, have already left him but a shattered constitutionì.”
The “wounds” had been inflicted on Rennell while fighting off a band of robbers in the dense jungles of north Bengal. After a leopard killed five men from his survey party, Rennell stabbed the rampaging animal through its mouth when it was his turn. A 1968 academic writing for the Royal Geographical Society, thus opined, “In fact, in those days a survey assignment in some areas was virtually equivalent to a sentence of death.”
In a telephonic chat from Dehradun, Surveyor General of India Lt General Girish Kumar laughs at the suggestion of punishing fieldwork “for our robust surveyors”. He talks about his own walk across the flat and featureless Rann of Kutch with a magnetic compass on an assignment in the 1980s when there was no GPS. And how he found his way out of a quicksand. But any further border area survey talk is always met with a genial “no comment”.
When asked about his views on how post-colonial border disputes in India invariably get attributed to the “cartographic aggression” of the British Raj, Kumar shares another laugh. “We have been continuously improving our positioning infrastructure,” he says. “When the Great Trigonometric Survey started, how many millions of people died because the terrain was difficult? Border areas are difficult to map. I am the last person to blame anyone for any dispute. It is all created by circumstance and we need to improve and work with our neighbours. Where is the problem? I never blame my predecessors for anything. Any decision has to be taken at that particular moment.”
Kumar names William Lambton (1753-1823) and George Everest (1790-1866) as the two most crucial names in the history of Indian map-making. The duo was responsible for conceiving and completing The Great Indian Arc of The Meridian, which began in 1802 with Lambton. Officially called The Great Trigonometrical Survey, it covered the length of the country with a colossal web of triangulations over a distance of 2,400km in the north-south direction. Using theodolites (a 50kg instrument with a rotating telescope to measure horizontal and vertical angles) and 100ft-long chains, the English surveyors mapped British India with a scientific precision unknown at the time, making cartography in the subcontinent the most advanced in the world then. “The contributions of these two are remarkable,” says Kumar. “They laid the groundwork. If the framework is not there, then no other ground survey can commence.” Even till the 1990s, says Kumar, theodolites and star observations from the ground were much in use to determine latitudes and longitudes, until GPS technology came into the picture. But such is the astounding science of precision behind triangulation, which uses three mutually visible reference points on prominent hills or buildings to measure distances and angles using trigonometry, that even GPS often fails to account for minute differences. “GPS does not give real-time, accurate coordinates,” says Kumar. “It has to be processed to get those accurate coordinates.”
As we enter 2021, Kumar says that the triangulation method will be phased out in the next two-three years, except in the northeast. “We are now moving to the third stage of Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS),” he says. “These stations are very accurate and provide a virtual base station. CORS has given us a new dimension, how the positioning infrastructure has to be created within a country. We created Great Trigonometrical stations, then we converted them into GPS stations and now we are converting them into CORS. They will be like mobile towers.”
Charting progress: Sagar Gurung does high-precision levelling on the Uttarkashi-Gangotri route
Kumar says that they have already started establishing CORS in Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra, and it will soon be a pan-India thing. While we wait for CORS to take over the length and breadth of the country, intrepid field surveyors recount their own dramatic tales and travails of mapping India. As Kumar proudly declares, “Sovereignty of a country is defined by three actionable objects—its flag, its currency and its map. As surveyors, we uphold the sovereignty of the country.”
Payal Arya specialises in marine geodesy. The 28-year-old surveyor, based in Dehradun, makes advanced tidal predictions from water level monitoring stations to help shipping companies, navies and coast guards. In 2018, on a whim, she filled in a form for the 38th scientific expedition to Antarctica for a contour mapping exercise. Little did she know then that she would become the first female surveyor in the history of SoI to work in the coldest, windiest and driest continent. She underwent rigorous physical training imparted by the Indo-Tibetan Border Police at Auli in Uttarakhand, had counselling sessions for psychological preparedness at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi and attended discipline and fire-fighting classes at the National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research in Goa. But none of these could give her a fair grasp of the polar terrain for her “summer” sojourn to Antarctica from December to March, with normal temperatures at -10 degree Celsius.
“I was very happy to reach Antarctica. I was ready to face anything,” recalls a chirpy Arya on the phone. “For three months, I did not miss anything from India.” Born and raised in Manipur, where her father was an Assam Rifles officer, Arya was toughened by the National Cadet Corps. In Antarctica, as she left the Maitri base at 8am every day—trussed in three layers of suits and carrying a bag weighing at least 20kg along with her surveying equipment, including total station (advanced version of a theodolite) and a prism—Arya would brace herself for continuous walking. Her senior officer would find a reference point on an elevation where he would record measurements in his total station, while Arya would follow his directions and record coordinates in pencil on a map using plane tabling, the oldest method of mapping. “You never know where it is an ice sheet and where a hard surface. My job was to keep walking round and round and my senior would dictate points from one station. So many times I would fall over and my socks and shoes would freeze,” says Arya, giggling. “The terrible blizzard there is so strong, it rips through your body.” Protecting the map, however, was her priority. “Sometimes, I would lie over it to prevent any snow from falling on it. The pencil mark cannot get smudged, otherwise the accuracy of the map will [suffer],” recalls Arya, who never ate anything between breakfast and dinner; her packed lunch would freeze over outside the research station anyway.
Out in the snow there was no way to attend nature’s call. With a radio receptor in one hand and her earphones plugged in, Arya could only compensate for her constrained circumstances with music. Once when she slipped on an ice sheet, along with her radio and prism, Arya panicked, for she knew the instruments had to be protected at all costs. Then she remembered her mother. “She made me watch a lot of Bear Grylls before going there. In a similar situation, he showed how to just lie down and spread one’s arms and pull the leg out slowly. That really saved me,” says Arya, who had six minutes of satellite phone connectivity to India, to be used only once a month. But she dismisses all these difficulties to reveal the most complicated part of living close to the South Pole. “One day in a fortnight, all officers at the research station, irrespective of their titles, would be assigned ‘galley’ duties,” she recalls. “Everyone had to mop and clean that day. It was also the day you could take a bath. The most dangerous work for me was when we had to collect human excreta from the station and burn it in an incinerator. The wind would often make the ashes from it fly into our faces. The first time I did it, I vomited. Then I realised even the king has to do this here.”
In the geodetic and research branch of SoI where Arya works, she is one of four female surveyors in a department of around 250. Professional female surveyors are still hard to come by, long demanding hours in the field being only one of the reasons why it is not considered the most fulfilling career choice. Yet their eye for detail and patience for continuous observations are a much-needed asset. When women map, it is said, they can drive local policy change by highlighting their gender-specific needs like toilets, domestic violence shelters, women’s health clinics and child care services. A lot is changing; SoI is now attracting more female candidates.
For Swarnima Bajpai, posted in Kolkata, field surveying opportunities stretching into months have not really presented themselves. Yet, during her training at the Indian Institute of Surveying and Mapping in Hyderabad, she went to Uttar Pradesh for three months to work on a levelling line project, running for 200km from Jhansi to Kanpur, as part of the National Hydrology Project. “You can sit in a car and collect data on the latitude, longitude using wide-angle cameras and mobile mapping devices. But for the orthometric height (height above sea level), you have to walk,” says Bajpai, who would cover around 6km every day with her instrument and with columns as tall as her. She had help from Group D staff from SoI. “Sometimes when Group D staff are not there, we hire locals,” says Bajpai. “We cannot hold the [columns]. They often drink and run away. Handling them is difficult. Levelling requires skilled group D staff.”
Tall task: Swarnima Bajpai does high-precision levelling on the Jhansi-Kanpur highway
Mapping a territory is no easy task, for people are territorial. Bajpai recounts one incident in February 2020 in West Bengal’s Bardhaman district. Residents, sitting in protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act, reacted sharply to the survey party in a village there. “They took our surveyors hostage and the local police refused to lodge FIRs,” recalls Bajpai. “Our team tried explaining that we were not conducting surveys for CAA, but the villagers absolutely refused to listen. They tore all our official documents. Their mukhiyas carry guns, you know. For two-three days, survey teams had to halt the work. We were collecting data in the 2,000th scale, taking details even of ATMs. Locals got suspicious. But ground survey has to be done for verification even if it can be plotted with satellite imagery.”
The northeast makes for one of the most challenging terrains for a surveyor, with hundreds of kilometres into forward areas untouched by any transport network worth its name. Banshailang Kharmawphlang, from Shillong, carries out GPS observations in Meghalaya to produce hi-resolution satellite imagery as part of the geospatial data centre department of SoI. He has worked extensively in the border areas of the region. He often crosses rickety bamboo bridges or finds himself encountering militants in Manipur and Nagaland or a herd of elephants in Gossaigaon in Assam. “Field surveyors at Survey of India need to know how to work the GPS, total station, labelling and they can also do astronomical observations. We are jack of all trades,” says Kharmawphlang. “But we need more latest machines and specialised experts in the region.”
One legendary name in the field is Nain Singh, who was hired by SoI as a “pundit” for explorations in Tibet in the mid-19th century. He disguised himself as a Tibetan lama to reach Lhasa, where he stealthily conducted astronomical observations. His cousin Kishen Singh was robbed by bandits and reduced to begging while crossing the Tibetan plateau, but Kishen continued to record his observations incognito and resurfaced four years later with geographical data—after being assumed dead.
Today one would be hard-pressed to find intrepid encounters of the vintage kind in the accounts of field surveyors, but the work continues to be daunting.Å Prakash Chand, 50, from Mandi, has conducted mapping exercises across Himachal Pradesh for 29 years now, including for defence purposes. “First we used to traverse, now latitude and longitude can be given by GPS. Five years ago, there was no hotel facility. We lived in tents.” But there are wild encounters still. He recalls a recent night at Una district when he saw the gleaming eyes of a tiger outside his tent in the glow of a torch. “In the jungle,” he says, “you are on your own.”