Abstract

Geospatial Technology for Integrated Water Resources development
The National Water Policy’ 2012 acknowledges water, an essential but scarce resource with skewed distribution, requires common policies and strategies for its integrated development. Societal demands dictate its developmental priorities for meeting food, fibre and energy requirements simultaneously satisfying the aspirations as regards its quality and environmental concerns. Geospatial technology offers powerful resource management tool through multifarious facilitation to planners. Capabilities to observe/ map remote and inaccessible places for generating timely and spatially distributed multidisciplinary datasets based on geospatial attributes for holistic analysis of water resources aspects are some of these facilities. India-WRIS WebGIS (Version 4.0), launched jointly by Central Water Commission, Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation and Indian Space Research Organisation, Department of Space in 2014, offers ‘Single Window’ solution for comprehensive, authoritative and consistent data & information of India’s water resources along with allied natural resources in a standardized national GIS framework tools to search, access, visualize, understand and analyze the data for assessment, monitoring, planning, development and finally Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). The portal has been designed looking at the variety of users and their requirements. The portal next versions will be enriched further with modules like 3D Geo-visualization, direct link to current hydro-met observations, hydrology tools for online analysis and WRIS education.