Google has kickstarted its Map Maker service in India. Google Map Maker, developed by its Indian engineering team, permits users to add or edit features, such as roads, businesses, parks, schools, apartment buildings and localities and also add detailed information about these locations.

The company feels Google Map Maker can aid commerce by enabling people to map local businesses from their regions. Similarly, NGOs can benefit from it by effectively mapping challenging belts in rural and sub-urban areas.

"Google Map Maker solves an inherent need especially for countries such as ours where maps data is sparse. This product embodies our passion to empower people everywhere, to share knowledge of the places they know best by creating maps," Lalitesh Katragadda, software engineer and creator of Google Map Maker, said.

"This is a great achievement for our engineering team," Prasad Ram, head of Google R&D in India, has said. "This launch is the reinforcement of our commitment to bring more useful information to people around the world and especially in hyper-growth countries like India where maps are changing on a daily basis given the rapid pace of infrastructure development."

Google Map Maker allows you to contribute, share and edit map information for certain regions around the world. Once you understand the basics, you can locate, draw, label, describe and moderate local map features, including:

• Borders and regions (states/provinces, districts/administrative regions, cities, neighborhoods, etc)
  Roads
• Map features like railways, waterways, events and reviews