Bhuvan: India’s answer to Google Earth is apparently not good enough and it seems that most of it was hype initiated by the pompous Indian media in the light of India’s 63rd Independence Day. I lost quite a bit of hair today trying to use it. Every thing about the product was dull and lackluster and to top it all it was frustrating that people were blogging and tweeting about its superiority even though they hadn’t used the product first-hand.
You need to register an account with the Bhuvan website in order to use it. As if its long and tedious registration form was not enough I had to install some Microsoft goodies like DirectX9 and .NET framework 2.0. And if you have that installed then you also have to install the Bhuvan plug-in which is further pain to see in that page which doesn’t highlight any hyper-linked text. Now if you have done all of that then I congratulate you for your sheer courage to withstand all the effort.
This should work now if you are one of the stupid web user who are still stuck with Internet Explorer. I was trying to make it work on Firefox 3.5 with no success. Ohh yeah!! you also need to disable “protected browsing” for the Bhuvan site in order to make it work on Internet Explorer. This is too much work for a normal web user and that too for an Indian web user 
Anyway, I finally made it to work on Internet Explorer and I find nothing “killer” about it. It seemed like a half baked cake made by a terrible cook. It’s sad to see how terrible it gets as you can’t find any locations to see outside India. The search for London didn’t turn me any results while a search for a funny sounding town called Bathinda did took me to the place directly in the map.
All in all I’d say that this has to improve. Going by the speed at which the projects of the Govt. of India work, one can easily estimate that it will take few decades for Bhuvan to come anywhere close to Google Earth. I understand that the target market is just India but at least make a good product for Christ’s sake. I wonder why are they not using some good web designers and developers to make it little sexy. After all if you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.
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August 22nd, 2009 at 10:56 am
I agree with you about most of the stuff. Issue here is it is funded by indian govt. which is non profit organization and given by ISRO as “byproduct”. They had good quality of image data and they wanted to show their imaging experience skills to the world so that other countries will give them image projects. I don’t think purpose of that site is to give any best information.
Google earth work of identifying placeses and information is done by public where they put maps on internet and you can mark your place and write contents about it. They place it on the earth. I have found my living place in
mumbai is marked totally wrong because somebody put it wrong. I don’t think Bhuvan will be that open. Till today I have never seen non profit organization can do better work than profit making organization.