Many development problems in the Indian context are characterized by scarcity and poor quality of data, approaches to problems constrained by jurisdictional and disciplinary boundaries, actors in government agencies who are paralyzed by perceived lack of power to share information with other stakeholders, and a public who consistently complain of closed and exclusive management processes. Connectivity and information-sharing based on the internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) are potential vehicles to alleviate such problems. In issues of public participation and empowerment in spatial planning and environmental management situations in developed countries, internet-distributed geographic information systems are starting to be used (see for example Voinov and Costanza 1999; Miller et al. 2004; Bunch and MacLennan 2010).
To implement web-based GIS for public engagement, stakeholders must have access to computers and the internet (this includes physical access as well as computer literacy). Also, web-distributed GIS software and an adequate database must be developed and maintained (either by a stakeholder group or a management agency). The benefit of such an application of this technology is that it has the potential to shift stakeholders from a typical position at the end of the GIS production process („4‟ in Figure 1) to the position of analyst (at least in a basic sense) („3‟ in Figure 1) by allowing users to choose which data layers to represent, and by providing tools to query, measure and undertake basic spatial analysis (such as buffering) of that data. Some web applications are now providing capability for users to contribute and share data (e.g., see Goodchild 2007; Seiber 2007), and some, notably googlemaps.com, allow users to employ client-side scripts and server-side hooks to expand and customize features of the interface. Thus web-GIS is beginning to provide technological capabilities to allow users to participate in the process of development and communication of GIS-produced knowledge even at early stages of the GIS knowledge production stream (for example, „1‟ and „2‟ in Figure 1).