Integrated water resources assessment of Udaipur District

Project summary

Water resources in India are under increasing pressure due to increase in population, intensified agricultural production, changing food habits with growing income and industrial development, as well as pollution of the surface and subsurface waters. This has led to concerns whether water demands can be met while achieving food and nutrition security for the growing population and at the same time protecting the ecosystems. One of the growing urban areas in the state of Rajasthan is the city of Udaipur, which has experienced increased pressure on the water resources and is facing serious problems and challenges in securing adequate water supply of acceptable quality and mitigating pollution of the water resources.

Proper integrated water resources management in the city and district is hampered by insufficient knowledge of the overall water balance. The seasonal Ayad river is flowing through Udaipur city, however, the dynamics of this water system is poorly known. To improve the understanding of the system and thus establish a basis for better and sustainable water management, an integrated hydrological and hydraulic model will be developed and hereby clarify for the first time the overall water balance of the water system. A state-of-the-art web-enabled, GIS supported data support system (DSS) will be developed, which will contain not only time series of hydrological and meteorological data but also geo-referenced information on physical elements of the Ayad river basin.

Citizen science is documented as an efficient methodology to involve stakeholders in the management of their water and environmental resources. In the project, the citizen science approach will be further developed and used to complement conventional ways of scientific data collection for water resource management. In the process, this will result in the citizens becoming centrally involved in the planning of decisions related to water resource management.

Outputs

Midterm report
Collection of historical data, data from global databases and data from satellite platforms has been completed and made available via a data support system (DSS). The system facilitates storing and visualization of existing and new data including data collected by the citizen science component.

A MIKE SHE model based on a simplified groundwater formulation has been developed for Berach-Banas catchment with an area of 14,000 km2, which is much larger than Ayad River encompassing Udaipur. Due to the seasonal flow of Ayad River no time series of discharge measurements are available, which is a critical factor for assessing the water balance. Thus, the MIKE SHE model has been expanded to a larger catchment area to get access to two discharge measurement stations for calibration of the model. The results of the large-scale model will be used as boundary conditions for the Ayad River model. Work has started on developing a local hydrological model for the Ayad river catchment.

The Citizen science component is progressing very well. 17 webinars and in person workshops on ‘Water resources Management for Sustainable Development and the Role of Citizens’ have been carried out to engage citizens, students, stakeholders, professionals and influencers to take responsibility in the promotion of sustainable water management. 25 institutions including 17 schools have been equipped with measuring equipment and tools.

The project interacts closely with the SSC city collaboration project.