e-Governance on Environmental-Flow monitoring of Rivers in India
As per a report on “Environmental Flows: State-of-the-Art With Special Reference to Rivers in the Ganga River Basin” as part of exercise the E-Flows are defined as “The temporal and spatial variations in quantity and quality of water required for freshwater and estuarine systems to perform their natural ecological functions (including material transport) and support the spiritual, cultural and livelihood activities that depend on them.” Since the last decade, WWF-India and its allies have been fighting to protect the Ganga. While the work has been multifaceted, ranging from river flow difficulties to water pollution, climate change adaptation, and habitat and biodiversity conservation. During 2015–16, WWF-India, in collaboration with partners, conducted an action research study in over 2 million hectares of the culturable command area of two irrigation systems branching from River Ganga to understand the barriers to implementing Environmental Flows (E-Flows) in the critical stretch of river Ganga (between Haridwar and Triveni Sangam Allahabad). The team attempted to bridge the information gap about potential trade-offs for implementing E-Flows in a crucial stretch of the Ganga as part of this program. .
Science and implementation must inform environmental flow evaluations, which must be led by systematic monitoring and adaptive management. An effective environmental flow assessment must be science-based and supported by relevant stakeholders. The implementation of an environmental flow regime must include regular monitoring of the effects of flow releases to verify and evaluate whether or not the desired environmental outcomes are being met, as well as an adaptive management framework that is flexible and capable of incorporating monitoring lessons by modifying the operations of flow release structures.
India-WRIS Web GIS aims to be a ’Single Window’ solution for comprehensive, authoritative, and consistent data & information of India’s water resources, as well as allied natural resources, in a standardized national GIS framework with tools to search, access, visualize, understand, and analyze the data for assessment, monitoring, planning, development, and ultimately Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). In the year 2009, CWC, MoJS, and NRSC, ISRO, DoS collaborated on the project. The India-WRIS Web-GIS comprises 12 major info systems, 36 sub info systems, and 95 layers, all of which are divided into five primary groups based on requirements and data availability:
1) The Atlas of Watersheds
2) Layers of Administration
3) Projects involving water resources
4) Thematic Layers
5) Environmental Information
Basin, Sub Basin, Watershed, River, water-body, urban and rural population extents, Dams, Barrage/weir/anicut, canals, and command boundaries are some of the primary layers produced under India-WRIS. Depending on the theme, these spatial layers have a huge quantity of attribute data ranging from 5-100 years. The portal offers free downloads of all unclassified data from CWC’s HO stations as well as CGWB ground water data. Surface water, ground water, hydro-met observations, water quality, snow cover, inter-basin transfer links, land resources, socio-economic characteristics, infrastructure, and other administrative layers all have specific Sub-Info systems (Central Water Commission, 2022). As per the status report on Implementation of minimum environmental flows in river ganaga (upto Unnao), published in July, 2020, the daat was collected through emails, sms as well as automatic sensors (Ministry of Jal Shakti, 2020).