Digital atlas to issue flood warnings to residents

NEWDELHI: The Union government is preparing a digital atlas with maps of flood-prone areas that will give real-time information and warnings about any rise in the water level of local rivers and streams that can inundate crops and homes, officials in the water resources ministry said.

According to the officials, who didn’t want to be identified, this project of the Central Water Commission with the help of the Survey of India and the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) of the Indian Space Research Organisation will help administrations reduce the loss of life and damage to property during floods.

Countries such as the US are already using digital flood maps successfully. But the flood warning system in India is based on water-level forecasting, which tries to predict how much the level will rise by calculating the flow of water into dams and reservoirs, the officials said.

“For the first time the government will predict inundation areas at different levels of water. For example, which areas will be affected when a river’s water is a foot above the danger mark, or two feet above,” a senior ministry official said. “An evacuation plan can be made accordingly.”

The atlas, officially named “inundation flood advisory”, will be most useful in Assam where the Brahmaputra swells every monsoon and submerges large tracts of land, including the Kaziranga national park, the Majuli river island and scores of villages close to its banks.

In a pilot project, the government has mapped the Brahmaputra basin from eastern Assam’s Dibrugarh district to the international border from where the river enters Bangladesh to drain out into the Bay of Bengal.