• National Hydrology Project (NHP) was started in the year 2016 as a Central Sector Scheme with 100% grant to Implementing agencies on pan India basis.

    • The project comes with a budget outlay of Rs 3680 Crore to be spent over a period of 8 years.

    • It aims at improving the extent, reliability and accessibility of water resources information and to strengthen the capacity of targeted water resource management institutions in India. 

    • Thus NHP is facilitating acquisition of reliable information efficiently which would pave the way for an effective water resource development and management.

    • The Project, in its mid-term, has made significant progress in the fields of Water resource monitoring system, water resource information system (WRIS), water resource operation and planning systems and institutional capacity enhancement.

    • Under the NHP, a nationwide repository of water resources data - NWIC has been established.

    • As on date, contracts for establishment of 6500 real time hydro-meteorological (meteorological – measuring rainfall and other weather parameters and hydrological – measuring water level and discharge) stations have been awarded out of which, 1900 stations have been installed which would be shortly contributing data to the centralised data base.

    • Since the initiation of NHP, 12,273 surface water stations have been mapped in the Water Resources Information System compared to mere 878 in the year 2016.

    • In addition, within a span of 4 years 70,525 ground water stations have also started sharing data.

    • The Real time data acquisition system, the near real time data acquisition system and the manual data acquisition stations would complement each other and would lay a strong foundation for informed decision making for better water resources management.

    • The major success has been bringing all the states on board for sharing of water resources data on a centralized platform - a task hitherto left unaccomplished by previous Governments.

    • Analytical tools and knowledge products are being developed under the NHP such as

        ◦ streamflow forecasting with a long lead time of four weeks

        ◦ upscaling of flood forecasting to include inundation mapping

        ◦ sediment transport modelling

        ◦ framework for water resources assessment

        ◦ reservoir optimization

        ◦ glacial lake atlas

        ◦ Web enabled GIS based spring inventories

    • Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems are being installed on selected projects for automation of water release process based upon real time data.

    • A lot of data-driven developments are expected to follow naturally over the course of time in the government as well as the private sectors and academic and research institutions, that hold the potential of transforming the water sector of the country from an age-old experience-based system depending largely on personal judgement to an optimised, transparent system where it is possible to holistically assess the impact of decisions across the sectors in advance, before they are actually made.

(The author is a trainer for Civil Services aspirants. The views expressed here are personal.)