Freshwater Management.

Water for domestic purposes is a critical resource and growing population coupled with urbanization is causing serious concern in ensuring long term sustainability of this resource. Heavy siltation of our freshwater systems in the tropical waters, causes flooding of the down plains during monsoons and water shortages during dry spell. The freshwater management has two major factors – the storage systems that hold the water for use during the dry spell and also to prevent flooding in the down plains. The alternate to storage systems is the recharge areas that facilitate recharging of the ground water. The type of the surface layer determines the effectiveness of the storage or recharge system. Any alteration of the surface layer due to siltation or improper de-siltation will render these system ineffective or even counterproductive.

Heavy siltation is also a critical aspect for water quality as well. The silt also carries a lot of chemical and biological contaminants that could be detrimental for human consumption. The calibrated use of freshwaters is another key issue that needs to be addressed. The high quality freshwater is being used for industrial applications and also low grade domestic applications, whereas multiple communities are unable to access reasonable quality freshwater for their domestic use. Water resource and water quality needs to be integrated and a comprehensive freshwater management framework needs to be established. The real0time monitoring of the domestic water supply will be a key requirement to ensure public health and safety across geographies.

The multiple regulatory authorities and agencies dealing with the twin issues of water quality and water resource is a cause of concern. Fragmentation across the policy makers and lack of appropriate technology & knowhow, makes the management extremely inefficient and ineffective. Pooling of resources and synergizing of efforts is a fundamental requirement. Policy makers at multiple levels (local, state and union) need to come together and be supported with the state-of-the-art technology and knowhow.  

The digital transformation is the only way forward to make it future ready and cost effective in the long term. The M&S effort on one end is extremely useful for prediction of the future trends, however the availability of the input data from multiple sources and also the infrastructure for field validation is a highly resource intensive proposition. The entire validation is three step formulation. To see, is the sensors and the platform to carry the sensor to the appropriate location for sensing, then to understand, is the comprehensive data analytics infrastructure and the knowhow and then the, to share, is the availability of the actionable inputs for the user in real-time.

The project will identify the gaps across the varied applications and provide the UDA framework driven digital construct. The detailed interventions will be articulated with local site specific R&D inputs. The traditional knowledge will also be incorporated while formulating the solutions. Aspects of MSP and field validated M&S tools will be deployed to formalize the interventions. The criticality of freshwater needs no emphasis, and the urgency of intervention also needs no further elaboration. However, a nuanced governance mechanism supported by innovative and customized inputs.