Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Identification of Surface Water Harvesting
Sites for Water Stressed Area Using GIS:
A Case Study of Ausgram Block, Burdwan
District, West Bengal, India
C. Prakasam
Introduction
Water is the most vital element for survival on earth. It has become one of the
emerging environmental issues our ecosystems are facing today. Issues of water
quantity, quality and availability are the three major concerns and are vital to the
quality of life on earth. It is one of the most essential resources in our day-to-day
life. It is depleting fast in rural as well as urban areas mainly because of increase in
agricultural and domestic demands (Kumar et al.
2008
). In water resources plan-
ning, ground water is attracting an ever-increasing interest due to scarcity of good
quality subsurface water and growing need of water for domestic, agricultural and
industrial uses. In a densely populated country like India, groundwater resource is
in high demand. In undulating terrains, availability of water resource is of limited
extent. Efficient management and planning of water resources in these areas are of
utmost importance.
Surface water is naturally replenished by precipitation and naturally lost through
discharge to the oceans, evaporation, evapo-transpiration and subsurface seepage.
Although the only natural input to any surface water system is precipitation within
its watershed, the total quantity of water in that system at any given time is also
dependent on many other factors. Human activities can have a large and sometimes
devastating impact on these factors. Humans often increase storage capacity by con-
structing reservoirs and decrease it by draining wetlands. Natural surface water can
be augmented by importing surface water from another watershed through a canal
or pipeline. Availability of water plays very important role in deciding the nature
and extent of land use land cover (LULC) of any region. LULC—the assemblage of
biotic and abiotic components and their modification for beneficial output—is one
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