A fundamental requirement of Agenda 21 of UNCED is to support sustainable development while safeguarding the earth's environment. This will require optimal management of natural resources which depends upon the availability of reliable and timely information at national and regional levels Remotely sensed data play an increasingly important role as a source of reliable and timely information needed for sustainable management of natural resources and for environmental protection. Through GIS, remote sensing data can be integrated with data from other sources to facilitate the efforts of resource managers, planners and decision makers in obtaining the relevant information they need. In view of facilitating such a sustainable resource management in developing countries, the Centre conducts a post graduate course in Remote Sensing and GIS as applied to various earth resources disciplines. The venue of the course, Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (IIRS) is a premier training institution in the region that has trained more than 7600 persons from India and abroad in the last three decades. IIRS is well equipped with state of the art computing facilities such as personal computers and workstations with modern peripherals and softwares. It also possesses laboratories for ground truth equipment and technology understanding. The institute has collaborative mechanism also with prominent international institutions and is engaged in research and consultancy activities besides training.
All Educational Programmes are conducted in English. In principle, students are expected to be sufficiently fluent in English, but facilities for improving their English Languages skills are made available to those students who want to avail of this facility, upon their arrival on campus. The courses are taught in classroom environments with the use of modern teaching methods and tools, and also include multimedia tutorials for self - study. Practical are given in the laboratories and skill development environments of the DOS institutions.
For each courses there are course directors who overall guides and frame the programme. There are course coordinators who assist for day to day educational programme.