If the google earth for India is as far out of date as it is for my house(3 years) it wasn’t much help.

Well, when you read the entire article, you can smell Indian Gubmint rats at work:

The complaint comes just weeks after India said it would launch its own version of Google Earth.

The project, dubbed Bhuvan (Sanskrit for Earth), is being developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), which is based in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of the subcontinent.

It comes as India redoubles its efforts to reap profits from its 45-year-old space programme, long criticised as a drain on a country where 700 million people live on USD2 a day or less.

Bhuvan will use a network of satellites to create a high-resolution, birds-eye view of India – and later, possibly, the rest of the world – that will be accessible at no cost online and will compete with Google.

Isro officials say Bhuvan will provide images of far greater resolution than are currently available online – particularly of the subcontinent, a region where large areas remain virtually unmapped.

The agency intends to refresh its images every year – a feature that would give it an edge over its biggest rival and help keep track of the frenetic pace at which India’s cities are growing.(emphasis added)

Nothing to see here, move along, move along…just India’s idea of “free capitalistic competition” at work…

That’s a good point, Bill, but there are some things to their credit. They’ve been opening up and getting more free and realistic than they ever were in the bad old “Non-Aligned” (i.e. Soviet shill) days, and they positively shine when compared to their neighbors.

What’s really a shame is that we’re losing our leverage to encourage them to keep opening up. If we weren’t slaloming down the socialism slope just as fast as our skis can take us, we might still be able to advocate for liberty and be taken seriously.