New Delhi, September 10: FINDING a locality in Delhi is hard enough: the system of marking address differs in each colony, and road names remain forgotten under a mountain of posters on cement boards. To add to the woes, the rapid pace of construction — from the Metro to malls — translates into a fast changing topography.

For the average traveler, this renders printed maps outdated in a matter of months. So, in comes mapmyindia.com, a website developed in the city and accepted globally, which claims to change as rapidly as the Delhi landscape itself.

The site took more than 10 years of sustained effort and constant development, and today has 22-year old Rohan Verma as its head. A thoroughbred Delhiite, the former DPS-Vasant Kunj student formally joined the company CE Info Systems, founded by his parents, two months ago.

He returned home after completing electrical engineering at the Stanford University earlier this year. That’s a family “legacy”, he says. “My parents came back from the US in 1992 after working there in engineering and management. Everyone thought they were out of their minds since the IT boom was nowhere in sight then.”

Once back, the Verma couple decided to create a digital map of the entire country. It was a task more daunting than they had imagined: between 1994 and 2004, they worked non-stop with 200 surveyors and satellite imagery. Verma junior, too, chipped in during holidays after each college semester.

“I got involved with the project from the first year of college itself,” he says. “I would work on the site, find ways to make it accessible to people, and discuss newer uses of digital maps.”

Verma is now making the site more user-friendly. “The 2008 version has a couple of new features. Apart from the map, written instructions are also generated now: it tells you the traffic signals you will encounter (on way to a destination), where to turn, the distance between various points.

Verma attributes the spirit of “doing something new” to his American alma mater: “Something happens to you when your neighbours in college are people like Blake Ross (creator of Firefox browser) and Ankit Fadia (Internet security expert). I wanted to come back and do something of my own.”

So, how does the company keep track of every development in Delhi? “We work on maps,” Verma says with a smile, “so it’s my job to know what is where.”