Research Projects

The share of agricultural sector is utilization of fresh water is around 80%. The efficiency of irrigation systems utilization this share of water is around 35-40% against the expected/designed value of 65%. The scenario is grave in case of larger surface water irrigation project. Increase in irrigation water efficiency along with increasing area under irrigation is on the top priority Government of India. As per conservative assessment around 14 million hectare land can be brought under irrigation by improving irrigation project performance by 10%. However, the main hurdle in direction is vast size of irrigation project and non-availability of spatial data. Multi-sensors remote sensing inputs can be utilized for mapping and monitoring of irrigation projects. The temporal remote sensing inputs can be used for crop acreage mapping, estimation of irrigation water requirement, performance evaluation irrigation projects at divisional level. The challenging task of irrigated area mapping can only be achieved using temporal remote sensing data. The land degradation problems due to irrigation can also be assessed using multi-spectral and Hyperspectral remote sensing inputs. In this research the temporal and multi-resolution remote sensing data will be utilized along with ground based data for performance evaluation of irrigation projects. The critical areas of performance degradation will be identified for and alternate operational strategies including conjunctive water planning, deficit irrigation, water reuse will be proposed for improving performance and agricultural returns from the project.