Ravi Vyas is after the Survey of India again; in a piece in the Telegraph of Calcutta, he documents a small change the Survey has made to speed up its approval process:

Under existing copyright laws, any map of India, and this includes historical maps dating back to Vedic times, has to be cleared by the Survey of India, failing which the publication can be confiscated. The Survey of India checks the “authenticity” of external boundaries vis-à-vis Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and the coastal boundaries that includes all the islands on the Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. This is an expensive and time consuming process.

However, because of repeated requests from publishers to simplify the checking procedures, the survey has made a small change: you can reproduce maps of India if you use outline maps provided by the survey. But these maps cannot be traced or reproduced photographically because the survey thinks that some distortion of boundaries takes place while doing this. If these rules are not followed, then the publisher or distributor has to add a disclaimer stating that the maps does not represent the authentic boundaries of India.

Fulminating against the bureaucratic insanity of it all, Vyas concludes: “No wonder we don’t have a decent atlas of India after 60 years of Independence.”

Via All Points Blog.

Previously: India Stamps Publications’ “Incorrect” Maps at the Border; Maps Must Be Cleared by the Survey of India.