The MCIA is a public owned body that monitors and coordinates all activities relating to cane industry in Mauritius. The Mauritius Cane Industry Authority promotes the development of the cane sector in Mauritius and its clusters through systematic policy measures, creating an enabling environment with innovative and efficient services, research and development, technology transfer and value addition to meet current and future challenges.

Over the past few years several plots of land have been abandoned by small planters of sugarcane given the decrease in increase in competitors on the global market. The MCIA set out an objective for the organisation to Identify these abandoned lands so that they can be re-purposed.

As part of this mandate, the MCIA and nVisionIT successfully developed a web based GIS system which would allow them to record data related to plots of land belonging to sugarcane planters. The purpose of the system is to visually identify the physical and exact geographical location of each plot of land and to maintain/update the status of the land.

The system provides real-time information and visuals through a satellite image on the following:

• • The land under sugarcane cultivation; and

• The current land use of fields which were previously under sugarcane cultivation.

The plots (in form of polygons) are visually identified by the use of colour codes representing the different use of lands(e.g. green for land under cane cultivation, red for abandoned lands, yellow for land used for infrastructure, blue for land used for other crops, etc.).

Built on the latest .NET, Cloud (managed application and database servers through Azure Platform as a Service) and Map technologies, the platform includes data management capabilities and analytics to enable swift decision making. nVisionIT’s GIS is adapted for logistics, transport and land management. It also applies IoT, machine learning and data analytics.

The platform boasts the following features:

• Store use-case specific data to each plot or object classified by layers
• Powerful and optimised inter active map interface for performance on web browsers
• Track asset lifecycle visually on the map and generate reports
• Advanced search feature integrated with map and reporting
• Easily import new or updated data using Excel templates and Shape files
• Comprehensive logging of access and modification of data

Initially, the system will be used by Officers of the MCIA and also by Officers from other Government bodies for e.g. Ministry of Agro-Industry and Food Security, Ministry of Finance, Economic Development Board (EDB), etc. Eventually, the authority may wish to extend the system to the sugarcane planter’s community whereby planters wishing to take on lease or acquire abandoned lands for any agricultural developments shall have access to the system.

The system has been running at the MCIA successfully for several months and its benefits can be summarised as follows:

• ACCESS ANYWHERE – Hosted on Microsoft Azure Cloud data centres near you
• MOBILE FRIENDLY – Designed from ground up to be responsive for tablets and smart phones
• DATA VALIDATION – Ensure data is valid and accurate to smooth follow-on processes.
• SCALABLE – Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud services for application and database servers
• SECURE – Secure-by-design application hosted on Microsoft Azure’s data centre
• CUSTOMISED TO YOUR NEEDS – can be tailored to your specific industry needs coupled with best practices for GIS