To address the problem, the Indian government has launched an initiative called the Information Technology Research Academy for Innovations in Water Resources Sustainability in India (ITRA-Water). Its goals are to educate the next generation of Indian water sustainability professionals, develop scientific and technological capacity, and lay the groundwork for sound economic and policy decisions surrounding water use. Its leader is CEE Professor Praveen Kumar, who brings expertise in water resources and information technology, as well as a holistic view of water problems — a critical perspective for India, where “every challenge becomes a water challenge,” Kumar says. Water scarcity limits economic growth, the production of food and the search for sustainable energy solutions, he says.
“Here is the water-energy-environment nexus in a very real, social context,” Kumar said. “It’s really not possible to solve one problem without addressing the others.”
Kumar led a Strategy Formulation Meeting in Delhi in September, at which participants from India and abroad — including representatives from academia, government, industry and NGOs — gathered to identify four Grand Challenges, toward which research efforts by multi-disciplinary teams will be focused. These are: improving hydro-meteorological prediction for economic development, improving groundwater levels and quality through enhanced water use efficiency in agriculture, the achievement of 24/7 availability for total urban water management, and inter-basin transfer for integrated water resource management.
Information technology will be key in alleviating India’s water problems, Kumar says, because many of them stem from a lack of information. For example, farmers who need to pump water for irrigation have been granted free electricity, but energy is not always available, so whenever it is, they pump water whether they need it or not. This practice has led to water waste and depletion of the groundwater. Irrigation scheduling can be done better with knowledge of the state of soil-moisture and reliable weather forecasts that can be delivered using mobile phones to the farmer. Digging new wells without knowing where the water is located has put many farmers into debt, a situation that could be prevented by information as to where groundwater is located.
ITRA-Water defines information technology as “cyberinfrastructure that includes communication, computational, and collaborative technologies; sensors and sensor systems; data management and data mining technologies; and knowledge and decision support systems.”
Still, technological advances stemming from ITRA-Water research projects, as critical as they will be, will not be the most valuable result of the initiative, Kumar said.
“The goal is to develop a new generation of professionals who are trained in inter-disciplinary thinking,” he said. “The hope is that they will be in charge of making decisions and policies to actually address these problems in the system. So while we are tackling some challenging problems, and working on research, and setting up prototypes and addressing some of these things, we are hoping that the key product of this effort is actually the trained professionals who will address this problem.”
Farmer: istockphoto.com/Vasuki Rao
Cell phone messages: Praveen Kumar