The BITSunami intervention was an attempt to re-build two tsunami hit villages in the Vedaraniyam Taluk of Nagapattinam District in Tamil Nadu. Monitoring and assessment of such a comprehensive effort required a system capable of dealing with large amounts of dynamic and spatial data. FERAL made a presentation demonstrating possible applications of GIS for similar projects and followed up with a proposal to set up a GIS based system for the BITSunami project. A unique aspect of the project was that while the intended outputs were stated in the proposal, it was agreed that additional objectives may be appended and existing ones modified. This flexibility was necessary as the coordination team at BITSunami was not familiar with GIS as a technology. Thus he project saw two phases of activities, with the second one refining and fillings in gaps identified in the first phase.