Contribution of Geography towards the Society | Essay | Geography

In this essay we will discuss about the contribution of geography towards the development of society.

Geography in Britain has included some notable contributions towards the solution of practical problems. Dickinson (1969) has traced out the influence of the French sociologist Fredric Le Play on the Scottish regional planner, Patrick Geddes. Geddes developed the concept of the regional survey of potential land quality and land use as the basis on which to draw up a plan for economic development.

In 1896 Hugh Robert Mill suggested for using the sheets of the Ordinance Survey (1 inch to the mile) and four years later provided an example of how such mapping of relevant information could be done and how it could be used. His suggestion was discussed, but not operationalised. The British geographer who put these earlier ideas into practice was L. Dudley Stamp.

After being convinced that Mill and Geddes were right about the need for a survey of Britain on basis for planning, he began searching the ways to carry out such a survey by plotting categories of land quality and land use on the ordinance map at 6 inches to the mile. Stamp recognised that quite aside from the practical importance, a survey would be a basis for planning; the work of making it would have an excellent educational experience for children.

With great energy and patience, Stamp undertook to organise and direct what became known as the British Land Utilization Survey. He took the help of some 22,000 school children in his pioneering work.

Geography students and staff at various universities cooperated in providing the professional personnel. The work was started in the summer of 1931, and by the end of 1935, the mapping was completed. The importance of these maps was realised when the Second World War began in 1939. Under the directive of the Ministry of Agriculture, all the maps were published between 1939 and 1945.

The survey maps were used in a variety of ways and purpose in addition to the planning of emergency crop expansion during the war. It would scarcely have been possible to increase the production of wheat so rapidly had it not been for the existence of these field studies.

L. D. Stamp in his Applied Geography (1960) makes the observations, ‘… the unique contribution of the geographer on the holistic approach in which he sees the relation between man and his environment, with its attendant problems, as a whole, the relationship is discerned by survey in the field, and the gathering of facts systematically and objectively, but the twin goals of survey and analysis are achieved fully only when studied cartographically.’

These survey and analysis procedures were extremely relevant to some of the most pressing world problems—population pressure on space, economic development and the improvement of living conditions. Many years later, in 1965, Stamp became Sir Dudley Stamp in recognition of his contribution to the survival of his country.

In 1946, the Town and Country Planning Act established a new survey to be done at a scale of 1/25,000 and to be kept continuously up-to- date. It was at the instance of Dudley Stamp that the legislation was passed. In Lisbon, at the International Geographical Congress, 1949, Stamp’s proposal that a world land use survey be established, was adopted, and an international commission was set up to supervise the work. The maps were to be published at 1/1,000,000.

British geographers studied public policy, welfare, and the social good. A growing concern with relevance, with the inequalities within society, environmental degradation, and the very structure of the capitalist system began to emerge. This point of view was, however, attacked, and a new set of political values were postulated and for the first time a political value-land (applied) geography was postulated, albeit by a minority.

The Institute of British Geographers (IBG) took initiative to work on various societal problems, and also sought to contribute to the solution of such problems. The debate on how geographers should contribute to the public policy was a major issue at 1974 conference of IBG. Since 1996, both the Royal Geographical Society and Institute of British Geographers started working together towards contributing in a greater way to the solution of practical societal problems.

The British geographers, however, have claimed that the applied geography in Great Britain started with the agricultural and land use mapping under the supervision of Sir Dudley L. Stamp in 1930s, but a look at the history of the British geography has revealed the development of another kind of applied geography, involving the delimitation of political boundaries.

Among the distinguished boundary specialists, the name of Thomas H. Holdich stands out. He became involved in boundary surveys in 1884 when he was appointed chief of the survey team to demarcate the boundary between Russia and Afghanistan.

This was an applied work of very high relevance in contemporary central Asian political geography. And from that point of view, Thomas H. Holdich was 12 years ahead of Hugh Robert Mill, as his applied work on the boundary delimitation was done in 1884, while Hugh Robert Mill’s suggestion for land-quality field-mapping using the sheets of the Ordinance Survey (1 inch to the mile) came in 1896.

Thomas H. Holdich was superintendent of Frontier Surveys in India from 1842 to 1848. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he was selected to establish the boundary between Argentina and Chile in Patagonia. He successfully used geographical methods in the solution of a particular set of problems, arising out of territorial disputes between Russia and Afghanistan; Argentina and Chile.

Even the delimitation of the McMahon Line on the map (8 inch to the mile) by Great Britain and Tibet, delimiting the Tibet-Assam boundary in 1914 at Simla was another example of the application of geographical principles and skill to solve the vexed problem of the boundary which had remained ill-defined for centuries.

It was an example of ‘applied’ work, because it was designed to resolve the problem of boundary delimitation in the Eastern Himalayan region. The British geographers and scholars who were in India during their colonial period had done extensive works of ‘applied’ nature.

In Great Britain, ‘applied’ geography was as developed as ‘pure’ geography, and in some cases, the development of ‘applied’ geography moved ahead of ‘pure’ geography, probably because of social and political necessities.

In Germany and France, ‘applied’ geography could not develop to the extent as it was developed in Great Britain. In fact, these two European countries experienced the development of ‘pure’ geography, designed to generate theoretical knowledge, or to identify the place of geography in the division of knowledge, intended to promote the status of the discipline within academics.

Nevertheless, between the inter-war period, particularly in Germany, the transformation of political geography into geopolitik or the application of geographical principles and skill to political-territorial problems that Germany was made to suffer on account of the demilitarisation of the Rhineland, could be cited as an example of German geographers’ attempt towards a problem-oriented applied study, with regard to the state’s spatial requirements. In France, however, the involvement of geographers in comprehensive planning processes started since 1960s.

After much debate in the 1960s and early 1970s over the question of applied geography (la geographie appliquee) as a contradiction of traditional values in the profession, the younger generation embraced it, both as a theoretical and as a significant source of employment.

Geographical works of ‘applied’ nature, in Russia, began to pour into, between 1880 and 1914. In this regard, the contributions of the followers of Petrovich Semenov—A. I. Voeikov and V. V. Dokuchaiev—were of great significance and relevance.

They were primarily research workers whose innovative studies of climate and soil provided model problems and solutions to those involved in problem-oriented studies in contemporary Russia. A. I. Voeikov was one of the contemporary late nineteenth century Russian geographers to have recognised the destructive effect of man’s use of land.

His work was comparable to the works of Mary Sommerville of Great Britain who worked much earlier and George Perkins Marsh of the United States, whose work echoed Sommerville’s view-point with regard to man’s destructive use of land.

V. V. Dokuchaiev’s contribution to his innovative studies of soil was a milestone, in the sense that it attempted to identify and highlight the major soil forming processes and of the natural zonation of soils, according to climate, and then attempted to apply the concept of the method developed in the study, to make problem- oriented analysis of the soil studies. His views were enthusiastically received in the United States.

Dokuchaiev trained a number of students at St. Petersburg who continued to develop his ideas, particularly, N. M. Sibirtsev, who died in 1900 at the age of 40 only, developed the concept of ‘zonal’ soils as distinct from ‘azonal’ soils—the former reflecting climatic patterns, the latter more closely related to underlying parent materials or such local conditions as poor drainage.

K. D. Glinka, in 1908, brought Dokuchaiev’s work outside Russia. Similarly, based on Dokuchaiev’s work, L. I. Praslov compiled and prepared a soil map of Russia on a scale of 1/1,000,000—a project which was later carried forward by I. P. Gerasimov.

The development of ‘applied’ geography, in true sense of the term, took place during the Soviet period in Russia, when in 1918, the Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces was established in the Academy of Sciences, and one of its sub-divisions was the Department of Industrial Geography. The first assigned task was to make an inventory of Russia’s natural resources.

In 1920, in setting up studies on which the construction of a network of electric power stations and transmission lines was to be based, Lenin who was a strong supporter of economic regionalisation, specified that he wanted a ‘geography of each of the sections of the electrification’ and that he expected to see a map of the main power stations. Lenin insisted, ‘… the maps should clearly show the regions to be served by the central power station, the type of industry to be included and everything associated with these regional stations’.

The State Planning Commission (GOSPLAN) was set up in 1921, but a special commission on regionalisation was appointed and given authority to recommend a national plan for the division of the national territory into functional units. The commission formulated the concept of economic region in 1922, which would be ‘economically as integrated as possible … would represent one of the links in the entire chain of the national economy’.

GOSPLAN divided the Soviet Union into 21 such regions and then proceeded to a detailed study of each of them. It was in 1920, that L. L. Nikitin made his first investigation of the writings of the pre-revolutionary geographers.

The older data were combined with the latest information regarding natural resources, physical conditions, population and types of economy in each of the regions. Never before in Russian geography had such a vast diversified body of material been generated on a regional basis.

Russian geographers of younger generation got themselves involved in regional development, and many of them worked on problems of industrial location and resource development. One of the major policy decisions was the plan for the organisation of inter-regional combines that helped to develop regional plan in the early Soviet Union. N. N. Kolosovskiy was the author of the plans for the great Ural-Kuznatsk Industrial Combine.

A theoretical model for an integrated industrial region, combining basic resources with steel production and with industries using steel, had been drawn up in 1927 for the Dniper Basin; but Kolosovskiy’s plan called for the movement of raw materials and finished goods between regions.

There were two groups of geographers in the early Soviet period – the geographers who worked on practical problems of economic planning advanced professionally more rapidly than those confined themselves in the university teaching. To those involved in practical problems of economic building, the methodological and philosophical issues and discussion in geography appeared to be irrelevant; rather they were seeking for answers to ‘real’ problems.

N. N. Baranskiy (1960) at the Research Institute in Moscow had consistently fought for regional approach because this seemed to him the only way that ‘geography could make a useful contribution to practical question of economic development.

However, in the 1930s, Stalin’s policy of strong centralised control of the economy made regular approach less relevant and negated the whole idea of an ‘economic’ region as a ‘major territorial production complex with a specialisation of natural significance’.

Geographers had lost their ‘practical’ relevance during the Stalin-era. Soviet geography, during the period, or the whole of the 1950s, suffered from inherent inner contradictions, resulting from dichotomoies, and inconsistencies with regard to methodological and philosophical foundation.

There was considerable debate between I. P. Gerasimov and V. A. Anuchin, and out of the debate developed what was then known as ‘Constructive Geography’ in the (erstwhile) Soviet Union.

Constructive geography was geography applied to the practical purposes of building the socialist economy. Geographic concepts and methods in those days of the 1960s had meaning in terms of what they contributed to economic development planning. In place of regional science, the Soviet geographers preferred the term ‘landscape science’.

Isachenko made use of new terms with old meaning to focus attention on applied geography as landscape science, which he related to the Dokuchaiev’s ‘law of zonality’. A classification of landscapes with a hierarchy of scales or degrees of generalisation was worked out for the whole of the Soviet Union to be mapped on a scale of 1/4,000,000.

The main purpose of doing this was not just to provide maps for teaching purposes, but as a basis for identifying regions useful for planning processes. A landscape is a combination of interrelated environmental components (local climate, landforms, soils, plants, and animals) occupying a discrete territory.

It exists objectively in the natural environment. But the study of landscape just for the purpose of describing them, said the Soviet geographer Gerasimov, was not enough constructive geography must use this knowledge for the effective transformation of nature.

He offered four examples of constructive geography:

1. The study of the geographies of natural and cultural landscapes of the wooded steppe in the central Chernozem zone. The purpose was to investigate the heat and water budget on the Earth’s surface in virgin land and in cultivated land and then to experiment with various technical devices for controlling natural processes and to increase – agricultural productivity.

2. The study of the irrigated lands of Central Asia. The purpose was to find ways to control salt accumulation, to use water more efficiently, and to increase the irrigated area. Questions investigated include the fate of the Aral Sea and what the drying up of this body of water would mean for the total economy of the region.

3. The study of means of reclaiming the swamps of the Ob Valley by using properly placed dams and diversion canals. The study also includes the hydroelectric potentials.

4. Studies of the water in Lake Baikal for the specific purposes of reducing pollution, regulating the flow through the Angara River and finding new ways of putting this natural resource for better use.

Most of the urban studies undertaken during the 1960s and 1970s by the Soviet geographers, were meant for the practical purpose of providing the background for planning projects, and they were necessarily ‘applied’ in nature. Since 1970s, and particularly after the publication of V. A. Anuchin’s Fundamentals of the Management of Natural Resources in 1978, a major shift was noticed among the Soviet geographers to devote more time to environmental and regional problems, and to demonstrate the practical value of an integrated geographical approach to their resolution.

The Russian geographers in the ‘defederated’ Soviet Union have continued with this approach. They are now more concerned with growing social inequalities in the federation, and are seeking to address those problems through sustained efforts.

The Russian geographers are now increasingly putting emphasis on welfare and environmental issues, and in this regard the achievements of the Geography Faculty of Moscow University and the Russian Academy of Geographers deserve special mention for their pioneering works in the field of applied geography.

The development of applied geography in China and Japan mostly occurred in the 1950s and has continued till date. Wen-Kiang Ting, a geologist trained in Scotland and Co-Ching Chu, a climatologist trained at Harvard, were the two earlier twentieth-century geographers in China who were credited with having given an ‘applied’ nature of area and region-based geographical works, before China was taken over by the communists and became the Peoples’ Republic of China in 1949.

Ting and Chu brought the British and American models of applied geography to China, but their geography was later abandoned by the young Chinese geographers on the ground of being ‘imperialist’ in nature—an instrument for aggression.

Nevertheless, the Chinese geographers identified geography as a fundamental science, because every kind of economic construction needed and required fundamental knowledge in geography. Geography was, however, given a prominent place in the twelve-year plan for the development of science and technology.

Chinese geographers followed the Soviet model of ‘constructive geography’. As a result, they gave a new impetus to the idea of resource inventory. Several of the physical geographers who had studied in Britain reported on L. Dudley Stamp’s survey of land and land-use.

In China, they started a similar inventory in the 1950s in spite of renunciation of the British model, and a large number of college and school teachers, students and other individuals were assigned to the work. In 1958, soil surveys in Szechwan involved 140,000 people and in Kwangtung more than 170,000.

In addition to these surveys of relatively large areas, the Chinese geographers also carried out detailed studies of small and critical areas. They gave much attention to the identification of microclimates, where measurements of heat and water balance were correlated with crop yields.

In mountainous areas of the south, many enclaves of tropical microclimates have been discovered in which tropical crops of coffee, cocoa and rubber could be produced. Defining such microclimates was not enough; rather, the means of changing them for increased productivity were also sought and searched out.

The river basins were studied in detail, and geographers were at work on preliminary studies of a huge new dam in the Yangtze gorge. A project was surveyed to bring water from the Yangtze system to the Yellow River basin.

In the development of geography and the application of geographical principles and skills to practical problems, the role of the Institute of Geography of the Academy of Sciences in Peking needs to be highlighted, because it coordinated, and supervised all such research projects that were carried out with the objective of solution to major problems—physical and social.

Chinese geographers were never involved in methodological and philosophical debates, rather they attempted for an integrated and geographic approach to demonstrate the practical value of the discipline to resolve practical problems.

Although Japan has a rich tradition of ‘pure’ geography, having been developed in the early years of the twentieth century, but the development of applied geography actually took place after the end of the Second World War when the Geographical Survey Bureau (in 1970 Geographical Survey Institute) was established in late 1945, to carry on a varied programme of mapping at different scales. The Tokyo Geographical Society was founded in 1879 and the Association of Japanese Geographers was established in 1925.

The Geographical Survey Bureau, founded in 1945, not only produced topographic maps, but also many thematic maps of such things as land classification and land-use, transportation, population and various kinds of economic data. The application of geographical methods to the study of practical problems of urban and regional planning was a notable development—notable because before the war very few professional geographers were in any way involved in planning operations.

But in the contemporary post-War period, geographers were employed in considerable number in almost every city and prefectural planning commission and in the planning work of the larger metropolitan areas. A private agency, the Japan Centre for Area Development Research, has been undertaking since 1980 studies relevant to the policy problems of Japan as a whole.

Applied work has been done by Japanese geographers in the areas of social and regional construction, and regional planning, agricultural productivity, economic reconstruction, land-use and land classification, environmental and resource management, disaster management, agricultural regionalisation, trade and commerce, Pacific Ocean and defence, etc.

In the United States, the first major breakthrough in the use of professionally trained geographers to study practical problems came during World War I and its aftermath, although some works of this nature were done in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century also. However, during the 1920s and 1930s not only were certain wartime projects continued and completed, but new kinds of applied research were undertaken.

A large number of geographers were called into both military and civilian service during World War II, and since then opportunities for employment in various branches of government and also in private business firms have grown rapidly. Many studies involving the geographical analysis of location or of areal spread were still made by non-geographers, but in the contemporary period there was growing appreciation of the value of the professional training that the geographers underwent.

One of the first uses of the knowledge and skills of the trained geographers was in connection with certain commodities studies. The work had to be done under the patronage of the Division of Planning and Statistics of the US Shipping Board.

It was a wartime need. However, the board was asked to classify all imports into one of three categories – those commodities so necessary to the war efforts that all available supplies must be imported; those commodities essential to the war effort, but not in such a short supply that all available production had to be imported; and those commodities not required for military or civilian needs.

A number of geographers, under Walter S. Tower who was made the head of the Commodities Section of the Shipping Board, were appointed to prepare the report on the commodity supplies which was highly appreciated.

The discovery that geographers had useful skills for commodities studies led to the setting up of another Division of Planning and Statistics as the War Trade Board. The geographer selected to head the research unit was Harlan H. Borrows, who recruited few more geographers of his choice to complete the project/study.

The US President Wilson had set up an organisation under Col. E. M. House that would gather the most complete collection of information possible and prepare it for use at the coming Paris Peace Conference. The group which was formed and called the Inquiry, consisting of some 150 specialists, including a good number of geographers.

A major part of the work that the geographers were assigned was in the field of cartography in which a map-making programme was made, showing pre-War political boundaries, the complete drainage system, the roads and rail roads, and the cities and towns.

Some of the maps were prepared on a scale of 1/1,000,000 or 1/3,000,000, and a few maps were prepared on a scale of 1/250,000. Isaiah Bowman, who was the director of the American Geographical Society (AAG) since 1915, supervised the geographical studies. He wrote a book, based on his experiences at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, entitled – The New World, and it was perhaps one of the most authoritative studies in political geography.

It provided informative detail of practical problems of particular regions, with adequate description of the local setting and the historical background so that the readers could understand what was going on in the post-War world.

For many years after the War, Isaiah Bowman and the American Geographical Society were involved in boundary studies and programme of mapping. Bowman not only settled the European boundary problems at the Paris Peace Conference, but also offered solution to the Guatemala-Honduras boundary problem.

Under Bowman’s direction, the American Geographical Society had undertaken a major research programme leading to the compilation of a map of Hispanic America on a scale of 1 /1,000,000, conforming to the standards and format of the international map of the world.

Although the Hispanic America project sponsored and supported publication of a series of research studies, but the most important is the study of the Central Andes by A. G. Ogilvie, the Scottish geographer. It was based on the -compilation from the drawings of the Millionth Map and from Bowman’s copious notes.

The map was used to help adjudicate disputes between Chile and Peru in 1925, Bolivia and Paraguay in 1929, Columbia and Peru in 1932, and Columbia and Venezuela in 1933. The Hispanic America Map, completed in 1946 in 107 sheets (over 300 square feet in extent) was a contribution to the millionth map of the world.

Another quite different application of geography to the solution of practical problems had to do with studies of land quality and land-use. It was long recognised that detailed information concerning land resources was needed if plans for better resource use were to be properly guided.

In fact, efforts to classify land in terms of its potential use began in the early days of the independent United States and were carried to new levels of utility in the Great Surveys of the West and in the work of the US Geological Survey in the later part of the nineteenth century.

It was in that perspective and programme that the Michigan Land Economic Survey was planned in the 1920s. Carl O. Sauer and Wellington D. Jones provided the leadership to the Michigan land economic survey. Later they were joined by Arbor Sauer and Parish S. Lovejoy—the forester and naturalist. By the mid-1930s, detailed mapping was done with land quality and capacity of the Michigan Area which was later defined as being a distinctive contribution to the expanding field of land classification and land-use planning.

Similarly, Harlan H. Borrows had made three major contributions to water-planning studies. He played an important role in the formulation of policy regarding multipurpose river development projects that were developed during the 1930s.

Besides, he had designed the procedure for integrated regional studies as essential basis for policy planning. Between 1935 and 1938, he drew up a plan which was accepted by the states of Colorado, New Mexico and Texas for the allocation of the water of the upper Rio Grande.

He also offered cooperative solutions for the water of the Pecos River, the Red River of the North and the Columbian Basin.

A good number of geographers under the direction of G. Donald Hudson were employed in the Department of Regional Planning Studies, with the objective of preparing a detailed survey of the Tennessee River Basin. The basin was, however, surveyed by the unit area method to provide an inventory of the nature and extent of land resources.

Between 1941 and 1943, with the help of the so-called area analysis method, many small depressed areas in different parts of the United States were studied, and the approach was found to be useful in the guidance of efforts to rebuild the depressed economies.

The so-called area analysis method was based on an outline to be filled in by field observation and was summarised under four main headings:

(a) The employment pattern;

(b) The condition affecting employment and income (natural resources, economic activities and institutions);

(c) Direction of desirable adjustments and (d) the proposed programme of remedial action.

Since World War II, the whole approach to studies of this kind has been revolutionised through the use of computer programs, with data supplied from new remote sensing devices.

The American geographers, particularly G. Donald Hudson and Clarence F. Jones had assisted Latin American geographers in the field of land classification studies. Some of the Latin American geographers were trained in the United States, for example, Rafael Pico (who was trained in the Clark University, and had obtained his PhD degree from the university), was chairman of the Puerto Rico Planning Board.

The Puerto Rico Rural Land Classification Survey was carried out between June 1949 and August 1951. The survey, however, demonstrated the value of this kind of inventory. The survey information was used to re-plan the land-use pattern, and also to plan the routes of new roads and to locate the numerous small manufacturing plants in relation to population and accessibility.

Since that time, many somewhat similar surveys were undertaken in Latin America, some by the Organization of American States, some by the Agency for International Development, and some by Latin American government agencies, as in Brazil. Some surveys as in Chile were done by private agencies of the United States on contract.

Isaiah Bowman was allotted fund by the Social Research Council to make an in-depth study of pioneer settlement. In fact, in 1925, he turned his attention to problems relating to thinly populated areas on the margin of settlements, and for that, had submitted a proposal to the National Research Council to obtain funds for studies of pioneer area. His proposal was finally endorsed and approved by the NRC. He also got funds from the Council of American Geographical Society.

Pioneer belt studies were not solely concerned with the possibilities of new settlement, but such studies were also concerned with the need to withdraw from less favourable places. Bowman proposed to study pioneer movements all around the world and to identify certain general conditions not only the kinds of physical institutions considered favourable, but the attitudes and objectives that led people to become pioneers, and the economic, social and political institutions that could best support pioneers.

Bowman also proposed to investigate the particular and unique conditions in specific pioneer areas, knowledge of which would be essential to the transformation of policy. His proposal ranged widely over all the fields of the social sciences and was essentially interdisciplinary in concept.

His book The Pioneer Fringe in 1931 dealt with the nature of the problems and offered examples from the western United States, Canada, Australia, southern Africa, Siberia, Mongolia, Manchuria and South America. A volume containing 27 cooperative studies of particular pioneer regions came out in 1932. Finally, Bowman in collaboration with Karl Pelzer, summarised the results of the whole undertaking in a report on the world’s potential pioneer areas in 1937.

The demand for the services of geographers in World War II far exceeded the supply of experienced and properly trained professionals. Geographers were required in all kinds of work performed during World War I and also in many research studies.

They worked as commissioned officers and non-commissioned drafters assigned to intelligence agencies. Some of the geographers helped to prepare the compilations of information about countries or parts of countries either as a basis for planning military operations or as a guide to military government after the war.

A large number of geographers in the Office of the Strategic Services were assigned to cartographic work, while others worked on various countries where the Joint Army-Navy Intelligence Service (JAN IS) hand­books were needed.

Many geographers worked on special problems and prepared background reports for the guidance of those who were responsible for decisions. Geographers prepared specific adases which provided information of environment of the areas regions, with regard to the variety of equipment necessary to carry out field operations.

This work was continued and expanded after the war. Geographers were required to make detailed studies of the beaches and the terrain behind beaches of the enemy-occupied territories for the landing of the allied troops.

One group of geographers received special training in the study of transportation facilities, but the very important function that could be performed only by an experienced regional specialist was the interpretation of capabilities and intentions of foreign countries.

The group of geographers, dealing with the study of transportation facilities, undertook to provide descriptions, photographs and maps showing the condition of transportation facilities immediately after the armies started their advance eastward. The materials gathered proved to have great practical value and utility for those commanders in charge of logistics.

However, those geographers who had called themselves regional specialists had focused on parts of the United States or Latin America. The number of geographers who had specialised in European, Asian or African countries was very small.

As a result, the work of foreign area interpretation was done by language specialists, historians or others who happened to have a familiarity with areas in question. The further result was that many persons—geographers and others—who were assigned to such positions proved inept and unreliable.

E. A. Ackerman (1945), ‘In the three years from 1941 to 1944 American geographers dealt almost constantly with a series of difficult professional problems… Nevertheless, geography unquestionably has wider recognition than ever before in this country…. War-time experience has highlighted a number of flaws in theoretical approach and in the past methods of training men for the profession…. The geographer perfectly or even adequately trained for the specialty into which he was thrown has generally been exception. The unfamiliarity of most young American geographers with foreign geographic literature – their almost ignorance of foreign languages, their bibliographic ineptness, and the lack of systematic specialties are but a few points which may be cited in proof.’

This situation of ignorance and lack of professional training in the systematic geography was attributed to a widespread belief in the essential quality of the subject.

However, it is equally important to mention here that despite a limited failure, American geographers had played a very decisive role in conceptualising the US foreign policies and relations in the war- torn world, and for that Isaiah Bowman’s role is required to be highlighted. He was made a member of the Stettinius Mission to London (1944), at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference (1944) and the San Francisco Conference (1945), by the US President, and at these Missions and Conferences, he (Bowman) showed the relevance of geography and its application to resource inventory. At all stages, leading to the creation of the United Nations Charter, Bowman put forward the relevance of the geographical point of view and its value.

The application of geography to practical problems took place in many other sectors before the decade of the 1950s. One of these was in marketing research for private business firms. William Applebaum had prepared a thesis on secondary commercial centre of Cincinnati which had a significant applied value.

Since 1931, and especially since World War II, most business firms engaged in selling to the public added market research departments, and the demand for persons with geographic training to work in the field of market research increased considerably.

In 1961, a whole issue of Economic Geography was devoted to a series of papers detailing examples of this kind of applied research. Economic geographers had been making studies in the location of economic activity ranging from iron and steel plants to floor millings.

Geographers such as Gilbert White and Joseph A. Russell made studies of natural hazards, including major river floods, and of military matters from the geographical point of view. A number of American geographers have worked with the agencies of the United Nations, and have made environmental studies in the wake of ever-increasing pollution.

They have studied the effects of weather and climate upon humans (physiological climatology). M. I. Glassner had advised the government of Nepal in negotiating a transit treaty with India and had functioned as consultant to the UN Development Programme for the land-locked countries of Asia. There are almost endless applications of geographical point of view to the problems of the real world.

In India, geography is yet to receive its ‘legitimate official recognition’ as a problem- solving discipline like that of ‘economics’ which is regarded as the only possible problem-solving discipline in social science. Economics is, thus, much ahead of geography in terms of application of its principles and skills to the problem. It is a fact that applied geography is developed in those countries which are in the category of ‘developed’ nations, and where geography is given due recognition.

Here, in India, the decision ­making elites do not consider geography as a potential’ discipline, in terms of its social and political, and economic relevance. Geographers in India are mainly involved in the theoretical aspects of the discipline, or in other words, they are more concerned with the development of ‘pure’ geography, rather than ‘applied ‘ geography.

Perhaps, the Indian geographers have failed to justify the importance of the application of geographic principles and skills to the practical problems, and this could be one of the reasons that both the public and private sectors do not require geographers’ involvement in their market researches. Even in the field of planning, the role of geographers in India is very limited. Very few geographers have really shown their worth in the various kinds of planning, including the spatial planning.

K. V. Sundaram was one of those few Indian geographers to have been appointed at the Town and Country Planning Organization, Delhi in 1958, where he served for 15 years. For the next 14 years, he rose from the Joint Director to Joint Advisor at the Planning Commission.

In the decade of the 1990s, Sundaram worked as a consultant under the banner of United Nations and other international organisations like United Nations Centre for Regional Development, UNESCO, Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and Centre on Integrated Rural Development for Asia and Pacific.

His geography was more ‘applied’ than ‘pure’ though he attempted to bring together both ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ geography into one unified geography. His work is mostly in the field of the various types of spatial planning, including regional and area-based planning.

L. S. Bhatt was attached with the Planning Commission and was member of Economic Advisory Council, Government of Uttar Pradesh, besides being the Technical Adviser to the Regional Development Plan for Western Ghats. He was also a member of the State Planning Board, Kerala. He has a number of applied research projects to his credit whose operational values in the field of planning were recognised.

The late V. L. S. Prakasa Rao, the late Moonis Raza, C. R. Pathak and R. P. Mishra have developed the theoretical aspects of applied geography, particularly those related to regional planning. They have suggested different ways and means regarding the application of geographic skills and principles to practical problems-development.

Though the government agencies like the University Grants Commission and the Indian Council of Social Science Research, both in New Delhi, have been providing funds to geographers and other social scientists to carry out research projects pertaining to social and physical problems, but the reports produced on the problems and once submitted to the agencies, hardly come out. Nevertheless, numerous reports are gathering dust in these agencies; they could have provided remedies to the problems analysed in the reports, had they been published.

Nonetheless, some departments of geography in India have done commendable work in the field of national concern in which the relevance of geography to practical problems was realised and understood. The Planning Commission in 1959 sanctioned a project, named the Damodar Valley Diagnostic Survey to three departments – Calcutta, Patna and Kharagpur. Similarly, after the Sino-Indian War of 1962, the Terrain Analysis Cell of the Ministry of Defence approached geography departments to undertake projects of terrain evaluation in areas of specific needs.

The Terrain Evaluation study in Bikaner and Jaisalmer Districts (1967-69) by the department of geography, University of Delhi, and Terrain Evaluation of Punjab Plains, Punjab Himalayas, and Shipki-tract, Rajasthan border, 1965-68, by the department of geography, Punjab University, Chandigarh, exemplified efforts to fulfil defence needs of the country. These works had immense strategic and practical values, and recommendations that these works had made were executed in full spirit by the concerned authorities.

However, it needs to be mentioned here that no such responsibility was attached to any departments of geography in India, after the submission of the terrain evolution report by the Ministry of Defence, Government of India.

The various Ministries of the Central Government and the State Governments, and other public and private agencies have never assigned any such responsibilities to individual geographers, or group of geographers, or department of geography in the past decades to carry on studies from geographical point of view, designed to offer remedial measures to practical problems.

There are various areas where geographers can do better than other disciplines of social science, because of their spatial outlook and cartographic/map-making capacity. There is a demand for greater involvement of geographers in the nation-building process in India, largely as a response to the challenges in social content, but for the government apathy towards geography, it has not yet become possible.