Former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav became the butt of all jokes all of Monday evening and Tuesday morning after he claimed that Google Maps could track accidents.
Yadav was being interviewed by a news channel, where he was talking about the encounter involving Uttar Pradesh Police and gangster Vikas Dubey, who was shot dead last week. Dubey was arrested at Ujjain and was being taken back to Kanpur for questioning, when one of the vehicles in the convoy turned turtle just a few kilometres before entering Kanpur city.
While there are a lot of questions raised around the encounter of Dubey, given that he was responsible for the deaths of eight police officers in Kanpur a week before his arrest. While the UP Police said that the car turned turtle due to a herd of cows, people haven’t bought the story, and the reactions on mainstream and social media have proved the same.
However, Akhilesh Yadav’s claims that Google Maps could solve the problem has left people in splits. Yadav claimed that using Google Maps, people could determine if there were cows on the road and if the car actually turned turtle. He added that there needs to be an investigation soon or all the data on Google Maps will disappear.
This is how people reacted
Notably, Google Maps does have a Live View feature, but that feature is not available in India. According to the Google blog, one of the pre-requisites for Live View feature is that the area should have a good Street View imagery. Since Street View is banned in most places (except for some pilot historical sites), this feature is not available in India, which is why Akhilesh’s Google Map suggestion would most definitely not work.
Also, Live Vies will not show traffic, but rather plot your location to make your tracking the place that you are looking for much easier.
Earlier this year, Google Maps completed 15 years in the market and Google released a detailed blog on how it had evolved over the years.
