TS to develop advanced Water Resource Information System

Hyderabad: The Telangana State Irrigation department has entered into an understanding with the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) to integrate weather forecasting into its efforts to develop a full-fledged Telangana Water Resource Information System (TWRIS).

According to irrigation department officials once the system becomes fully automated, the IMD data on district wise rainfall forecast for five days will be integrated and the rainfall forecast based crop advisories prepared by the agriculture universities will be made available to the farmers.

The Irrigation and Command Areas Development (I&CAD) hopes that this would help the agriculture department officials to take appropriate decision and to make timely interventions to save the crops.

It would also help the farmers in different parts of the state growing different crops to act as per the advisories given to them from the agriculture department.

Further, the agriculture department has also been roped into this exercise and work out modalities to fix their roles in overall planning, a senior official said.

Recently, the Irrigation Minister T Harish Rao held a detailed review to speed up the implementation of the TWRIS to have a Command and Control Centre (CCC) for the State irrigation department, he added.

The agriculture department on its part would be bringing in data related to soil conditions, water requirement and yield forecast.

The services of Bureau of Economics would also be used to integrate the website, the sources said.

Season wise cropped area will also be made available for every major and medium project using the satellite imagery by National Remote Sensing Center (NRSC) on the irrigation website.

This integration of data would help in sending alerts and advisories regarding crops to be grown, including the use of ground water and surface water etc.