Innovative Methods of Monitoring and Regulating River Water between Dams: A Noble Solution for Interstate Water Distribution

Abstract: India is a federation with distinct regions and complex water problems. India�s internal borders however reflect the vagaries of history and political compromise and bare little relation to the natural contours of the river basins. The same can be said for virtually every other nation in the world. India is facing serious inter-state water distribution crisis leading to interstate disputes which further leads to violence and political disorder in the country. The fault lies in the present system of water distribution between states or union territories. In this paper, we have proposed a semi-automatic water distribution system and innovative methods of monitoring and regulating river water between dams. We use automatic water level sensors to monitor the water levels in different dams instead of existing manual water level measuring scales. Measuring the water levels alone is not the solution; we propose a system which makes use of satellite images of the agricultural lands, thermal satellite images of the crop lands and weather reports by the meterological department to analyse the scenario and regulate the water between dams unlike the present manual system. Our system is semi-automatic - meaning human intervention is possible at any level of the system in case of system failure or system upgrade. Also we make use of a data acquisition and web-server (national server) to store data of each and every dam to provide proof or transparency in case of water sharing and a central decision logic which will behave accordingly as programmed. A particular signal will be sent wirelessly to each and every gate of the dams to regulate water. Also, the basic idea behind this paper is to virtually connect all the existing dams in India through a network and have a central server (star topology) and respective state or district servers, interconnected in a full mesh topology.

Keywords: Semi-automatic water distribution system, automatic water level sensors, satellite images, data acquisition, web-server, central server, star topology, full mesh topology.