Geographic Information systems are the  most important suite of software for integration of data collected from diverse sources. Therefore, GIS is widely used to develop models, to make predictions, to emulate or simulate a natural phenomena, to substantiate a hypothesis  or  just to see what’s  there in the digital database. IIRS is the hub of GIS software in this part of the globe with various levels of GIS software starting from simple 1-D, 2-D to very advanced 3-D software packages. IIRS has one of the largest installation of image processing and GIS softwares (Table 2) through central servers and made available through intranet facilities for training and education.

ILWIS 3.0, the Integrated Land and Water Information System, from ITC, Netherlands, runs on almost every machine dealing with training and research activities of the institute. For more specific users, ENVI, SPANS, PAMAP,GEOMEDIA, IDRISI etc. are available at selected locations. ARC/INFO  on PC and on workstations  give  best of opportunity to learn  and master the ESRI concept of GIS. IIRS has the best of the hardware peripherals such as A0 digitizer, A0 scanner, A0 raster & pen plotter, 8/4mm DAT drives, ZIP drives, CD-R/W and tape drives from leading manufacturers of the world such as Hewlett Packard, Summagraphics, DEC, DELL  and Compaq etc.  The centralised computer facility consists of  three education labs, central server, resource lab and production lab. All the laboratories are equipped with Pentium III/IV based PC and Unix workstations with the above mentioned software. Detailed facility (both software and hardware) has been given in the Geoinformatics division