Training, Education, Research and Capacity Building Needs and Future Requirements in Applications of Geospatial Technology for Water Resources Management

In India, water resources are managed at different levels, i.e. at central level by Ministry of Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation, Central Water Commission and Central Ground Water Board, at states level by state water resources departments, and at local level by Municipal Corporation and Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs). As per India’s national water policy of year 2012 focuses on adaption to climate change, enhancement of water availability, water demand management by efficient water use practices, management of floods and droughts, water supply and sanitation, trans-boundary rivers, conservation of water bodies and infrastructure, and finally research and training needs for each theme. Geospatial technology has unique role in all aforementioned themes. Therefore, research and training in use of Geospatial Technology (GST) in water sector is needed for each theme at different levels of water administration and water utilisation. The current paper discusses the existing framework and content of capacity building in water sector and geospatial technology in use at various government organizations and institutes. The major gap areas and future capacity building requirements are also highlighted, along with duration and timelines of training/capacity building programs. The use of distance learning/educations tools, social media, and e-learning are also highlighted in promoting use of GST in water sector. The emerging technological trends such as, new remote sensing sensors for measuring water cycle components, ground sensors based field instruments, cloud based data integration and computational models, webGIS based water information portals and training needs of new technologies are also emphasised.


Geospatial Technology Application in Water Resources
The water sector in India is under tremendous pressure from multiple uses, limited surface and ground water resources, growing populations, less-scientific and non-sustainable water utilization. The traditional methods of mapping and monitoring of surface and ground water involves large amount of human and financial resources and provides information on point or specific area basis. In the last 40 years, the evolution of Geo-Spatial Technology (GST) have occurred, which involves integrated use of Remote Sensing (RS), Geographical Information System (GIS) and Global Navigation System of System (GNSS). The GST has proven its effectiveness in repeated and large area mapping and monitoring of all natural resources including water resources and major components of hydrological cycle (Chakraborty, 1999(Chakraborty, , 2000Thakur et al., 2017c).

Status of Geospatial Technology in Water Resources and Capacity Building Needs
In the last 50 years, ever since the launch of Landsat in 1970s, and IRS in 1990s, the efforts are made to include/integrate GST with traditional methods of WRM by, using RS based Land Use Land Cover (LULC) map, generation of soil map and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) for estimating runoff potential and soil erosion of an area , ground water potential mapping, soil erosion, sediment yield and reservoir sedimentation assessment (Lilhare et al., 2014, Rawat et al., 2017, Foteh et al., 2018Prasad et al., 2018), watershed delineation using DEM, economic and hydrologic evaluation of watershed management plans (Rao et al., 1994;Sharma and Thakur, 2007), flood and drought mapping, monitoring and damage assessment (Thakur and Sumangala, 2006;Padhee et al., * Corresponding author 2014, snow cover and glacier mapping and monitoring (Joughin et al., 2010;Kulkarni et al. 2010;Bhambari and Bolch, 2011;Kumar et al., 2011;Thakur et al., 2012;Aggarwal et al., 2014;Nikam et al., 2017;Thakur et al., 2017a,b), irrigated area and irrigation infrastructure mapping and monitoring (Roy et al., 2010;Nikam and Aggarwal, 2012;NRSC, 2018), irrigation water and supply requirement (Durga Rao et al., 2001), assessment of land use land cover & climate change impact on water availability Aggarwal et al., 2016;Garg et al., 2017;Nikam et al., 2018). Most of these applications are driven by optical RS till mid-1990s, and addition of active Microwave (MW) remote sensing after mid-1990's and early 2000, with launch of ERS-1, 2 and Radarsat series of satellites (Britannica-2018, www.britannica.com/topic/list-of-satellites-2024625). Many of these applications were made operational by use of optical and active MW data by erstwhile National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA); which is now a part of Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) as National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Space Application Centre, SAC, Ahmedabad, with an active support of ISROs Regional Remote Sensing Centres (RRSC), state remote sensing centres and academic institutes. The capacity building for application of GST in Natural Resources Management (NRM) was first initiated in India during 1966 by former Indian Photo Interpretation Institute (renamed as Indian Institute of Remote Sensing in 1983 under NRSA) under Survey of India (SoI), in joint collaboration with International Training Centre (ITC) Netherlands (Van der Weele, 1976), for imparting training in applications of aerial Remote Sensing techniques in early years, and using Landsat and IRS data during mid 1970s and 1980s (Sinha, 1976). The research and capacity building needs of water sector were catered under hydro-geological theme, with many good geology and hydrology related works published during this time (Meijerink et al., 1984).
The dedicated capacity building of GST applications in water resources was initiated at Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (IIRS), with formation of Water Resources Division (WRD) in the year 1986 (Chakraborti, 1991(Chakraborti, , 1993(Chakraborti, , 1999IIRS, 2018). The initial focus of this division was to impart quality training and education in form of nine months Post Graduate Diploma (PGD) for the in-service government official and research on various contemporary and futuristic topics such as use of RS-GIS for watershed characterization and management, snowmelt runoff and flood forecasting, drought and flood studies, decision support for better irrigation water management, near real time flood monitoring, ground water prospect zoning, environmental impact assessment for water resources development projects . Later in year 2002, the Master of Technology (M. Tech.) with Water Resources theme was added, and both PGD and M. Tech. Course were opened for fresh graduates and other qualified professional Raju 2006, IIRS-2018). In addition to IIRS, many institutes including Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs), National Institute of Hydrology (NIH), Roorkee and other academic institutes of India have contributed in imparting modular and short course (1-2 weeks) based training in this theme to various users (Tejpal et al., 2012).
During the last 10 years, the availability scenarios of RS data, processing algorithms and ready to use tools has changed. Revised RS data policy of Government of India (GoI), advent of google earth, availability of free Landsat and other RS data at medium to high resolution from USGS-Earth Explorer (NASA-2018), IRS from ISRO-Bhuvan webGIS portal (NRSC-2018), Sentinel from ESA (ESA, 2014). Various NASA water related dedicated RS missions such as Terra/Aqua, Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) (Huffman et al., 2007) are few milestones in this drastically changing scenario, where focus has shifted towards retrieval of hydrological parameters (Thakur et al., 2017c). These vast improvements in sensor and geospatial technology has opened many new applications in hydrology and water resources sector in India along with even greater need of training and capacity building to implement these application operationally. This fast evolving GST domain needs a comprehensive assessment of present status of knowledge base of the users (both existing and potential), methods for conveying knowledge of GST to various users and incorporating futuristic research in the GST education to fuel the developments in GST for tomorrow's needs.
As per latest available public data from central, state government and urban/rural water organizations, India have more than 35000 working professionals in the field of water resources development and management. Apart from government officials, there are large number of personnel from Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) and Water User Organizations (WUO), directly involved in water management at local level. The Government of India (GoI) in its budgetary allocation for the year 2018-19, has allocated Rs. 5,970 billion to infrastructure related works in India (https://www.geospatialworld.net/blogs/budget-2018-beneficial-indian-geospatial-industry/), which includes GoI flagship programs such as 'Smart Cities' and 'AMRUT', Prime Minister Krishi Sinchai Yojna-'Har Khet ko Pani', which has direct relevance to water sector and GST. Due to diversity in geography, ecology, climatology, human culture in the country, the techniques required to carry out these programs will vary region to region. Therefore, requirements of GST applications in WRM capacity building for these multi skill level, variable geographical locations and different demographics will also be different. This paper makes an attempt to address some of these issues.

Objectives
The present paper, therefore has following objectives, with reference to the use of GST for improved water resources management in India: a) To understand and evaluate present training and education needs of GST in WRM, b) To design schema for different levels of training to various users, c) To understand the gap area and highlight new research in these areas of GST for WRM and d) To develop outline for future capacity building requirements and advances in GST for WRM.

PRESENT TRAINING AND EDUCATION NEEDS OF GEOSPATIAL TECHNOLOGY IN WRM
The present day scenario in the field of GST is ever changing and expanding with network of theme based satellites, sensors, data products, ground based sensor system connected with satellite and terrestrial based wireless communication systems, all aforesaid generating terabytes of data on daily basis (NOAA, 2018). This vast amount of data and information cannot be processed and analysed using traditional software and processing tools. Generating a usable maps and actionable knowledge from this available large datasets remains the biggest challenge. The expertise level of users, of the GST, remains at basic stage, and very few organization and motivated individuals explore full potential of such technologies in day to day work. This aspect was well highlighted during India's first national space meet organized on Sep. 07, 2015 by ISRO on the request of Honourable Prime Minister of India, (GoI-PMO, 2015). In this meet many new applications (a total of 156 space technology application areas were identified), requirements from various ministries of GoI were identified. Many of these applications were focused on generating updated geotagged information and basic GIS layers of various themes including that of water resources. However, the scope of GST in improving overall WRM and associated training and education requirement is much larger as explained in subsequent sub-sections.

Training in Geospatial Technology for WRM
The present training requirement for the application of GST in WRM is for various government departments, and other nongovernment and academic institutes involved in water sector. The major training programs constitutes short duration courses of 1 to 2 weeks, where first week or first few days are assigned to teach the basics of RS & GIS, and during 2 nd week or fourth day onwards, the various GST topics relevant to water resources and hydrology are covered. In addition to these type of courses, 1-5 days duration short or awareness courses are designed to basically cater for the needs of decision makers, the details of different levels of training is given in Section 3.

Different training needed in different geographical region of India:
The Indian region has 20 major river basins, with large spatio-temporal variations in the physical, geographical attributes such as elevation, temperature, rainfall, soils and geology (Figures 1, 2 and 3). This is combined with the large variations in the population density, agricultural and industries practices, which in turn affect the water use and demand, from one region/basin/watershed to other. These physical and socio-economic variations result in large hydrological changes, such as presence of glaciers in high altitudes of Himalaya, seasonal snow in middle Himalaya, alluvial region in Indo-Gangetic plains, deserts in arid Western region, rainfall excess in regions in North-Eastern India, hard rock area in Central and Southern India, etc. These hydrometrological and physical variations can cause occurrence of water scarcity (drought), and excess water (flood), snowfall at the same time in some parts of country.

Education in Geospatial Technology for WRM
The education or longer learning courses are essential to get the in depth knowledge of RS, GIS, GNSS and other GST technologies for better understanding of theme. The premier institutes in India responsible for conducting GST based educational courses for the water professionals and graduate/post graduate students are, IIRS-ISRO Dehradun (IIRS-2018), UN sponsored CSSTEAP Dehradun, IITs (Roorkee, Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur, Chennai, Ahmedabad, etc.), Anna University, Andhra University, few NITs & central universities, deemed universities e.g. Amity university, UPES Dehradun, and other academic institutes of India. Apart from these institutes and university, the ISRO centres such as SAC, Ahmedabad and NRSC Hyderabad, various RRSC also provide supervision of long duration (more than 3 months to external PhDs) projects of Master/PhD students of India (SAC-VEDAS).
At the international level, ITC, Faculty of Geo-information Science and Earth Observation, with University of Twente, and IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, both located at The Netherlands, are the premier educational institutes working since 1950s, where many Indian water professional have been trained in the field GST and WRM.
The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XLII-5, 2018 ISPRS TC V Mid-term Symposium "Geospatial Technology -Pixel to People", 20-23 November 2018, Dehradun, India The curriculum of these post graduate and graduate courses includes modular and semester based structure, where basic of photogrammetry, RS, GIS and GNSS is generally covered in one module or semester and thematic specialization are covered in next module/semester (IIRS-2018 Tech., courses, with only 12 officers. This declining trend is also seen in other disciplines of NRM, mainly due to difficult in getting permission and government sponsorship for such long duration courses. Many government officers have preferred short duration certificate courses, with duration of two weeks or 1-2 months for getting knowledge of GST in WRM. The details of such courses and multi-level training is given in the next section. Table 1. Summary of present capacity building status and needs in different organisation and agencies in the country.

DIFFERENT LEVELS OF TRAINING AND EDUCATION IN WATER RESOURCES
The Figure 4 shows the basic structure of major multi-level short duration training programs of GST applications in hydrological and WRM studies. Some of these multi-level training program can also be conducted in distance learning (DL) mode, as demonstrated and practiced by IIRS, Dehradun and National Water Academy (NWA), Pune, with NWA focusing dedicatedly on WRM (NWA-2018). However, many of the training program organised by IIRS are exclusively targeted to the university faculty and international participants, e.g., ISRO sponsored two months duration NNRMS training course for university teachers and faculty of academic/training institutes, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) of GoI sponsored two month ITEC course on RS and GIS, and during both these courses trainees can opt for WRM related thematic specialization and pilot projects.
The multi-level trainings given in Figure 4 are directly applicable to government official and water professional. The same multi-level programme and their contents cannot be applied to other stakeholders, which are mentioned in the Section 1.2 and 2.1.1. The large number of personnel from PRIs/WUOs and NGO, are actively involved in water management at community and local level, however do not have formal education in the hydrology, water resources or GST. These personnel need separate set of training tools, techniques and learning modules, which are easy to understand, use and implement in real world water management scenarios. The nearest contact points for village level users, NGO are BDO, KVK's and Panchayat. The first level of GST transfer using mobile based applications can be given to these officers, Gram Pradhan and nodal person of each Panchayat. This concept is implemented successfully by NRSC Hyderabad using its Drishti and Shrsiti geo-portal and mobile apps (NRSC-2017). Table 2. GST application gap areas, user requirement, present capacity and future research needs.

GAP AREAS AND GST RESEARCH NEEDS FOR BETTER WRM
The traditional and operational applications of GST in WRM are discussed in the previous sections. The last 10 years have seen emergence of newer GST applications and maturity of previous research oriented application in WRM, mainly due to the availability of large amount of satellite data and new sensors related to hydrology & WR and tremendous increase in computational power and communication technologies. The few of these emerging geospatial technologies, their applications domains, gap area as per user requirement and further research requirement are given in Table 2.

FUTURE CAPACITY BUILDING REQUIREMENTS AND ADVANCES IN GST FOR WRM
As discussed previously, the GST and associated applications are developing at fast speed in recent times. It is also evident from Tables 1 & 2 that present capabilities of GST are also not fully utilised in WRM due to lack of knowledge about these techniques among many of the users. However, owing importance of water resources for human life, coming decades are going to witness more and more dedicated remote sensing missions for water resources. New satellites such as, Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) Mission, NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR), GeoHR, Cartosat-2&3 series are some of the planned mission by different space organisations. However, the utilisation of existing and future remote sensing mission for improvement in WRM depends on awareness among user community about usefulness of these datasets and enhanced data products. For example, under Hydrology Project II, real time stream flow forecast systems have been developed for Bhakra Beas Management Board, BBMB (Punjab, HP) and Krishna-Bhima Basin (Maharashtra). Real time hydro-met data acquisition network has been implemented under this project which provides key inputs (ground observed data) required for forecasting inflows into the reservoirs to form the basis for reservoir operation decision making and providing flood early warnings to communities under real time decision support system (RTDSS). It is an expensive and time-consuming task to maintain such data acquisition network. Remote sensing inventions such as satellite based rainfall and altimetry have shown its potential to monitor inland water bodies at regular and longer period of time (Birkett et al., 2002;Prakash et al., 2016). Previous altimeter missions (ERS2, ENVISAT, Topex/Poseidon) and present missions (Jason-2 and SARALAltiKa) have shown there potential to monitor river water level (Papa et al., 2010;Dubey et al., 2015;Gosh et al., 2017). An attempt should be made via capacity building to consider altimetry technique as part of data acquisition network. Similar examples are also available in the sector of watershed management, snowmelt runoff, water quality monitoring, irrigation water management, etc. Hence, there is need to list out future sensors/satellites having potential in improving WRM with the list of domains in which each of these future mission can contribute in water resources. The scope of capacity building among different users should also be analysed and put forward which will assist the institutes, involved in capacity building of users in the field of application of GST in WRM, in evolving future strategy/road map to cater for this upcoming demand. The brief listing of future satellites/sensors having major applications in WRM is done in Table 3, the new geospatial products related to WRM from these mission are also listed in this table with scope of capacity building, including use of Distance Learning (DL) tools, such as, e-learning, webinars, etc., among the different users for utilising these datasets and products in WRM. These DL tools can help reach large number of WRM users of GST in vast country like India. Table 3. Future sensors/satellites, their potential application in WRM and future capacity building scope to utilise these datasets.

CONCLUSIONS
The integration of Remote Sensing (RS), Geographical Information System (GIS) and Global Navigation System of System (GNSS) is termed as geospatial technology (GST). This technology involves sensors for acquiring data, systems for storing and processing data and personnel to utilise these data products. The personnel involved in processing these spatial datasets are called geo-researcher and personnel involved in utilising these data products are geo-users. Geospatial technology has shown huge potential in improving water resources management through mapping, monitoring and retrieving various hydrological components at synoptic and repeated scales.
To enhance the knowledge of geo-researcher, geo-users working in the water resources domain and its stakeholders, Government of India has been emphasising on capacity building of these personnel. Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, ISRO, Dehradun, since its inception, has shouldered the responsibility of capacity building of geo-researchers and geo-users in the field of application of GST in improving WRM. However, the diversity of geography, climate, culture, languages in India demands for customization of these capacity building programmes. In the present paper, the current status of knowledge and utilisation of GST in various user agencies and departments working in WRM is analysed, so as to understand the present need of capacity building in the field of application of GST in WRM. Multi-level structured training programmes in GST applications for WRM is also proposed for various users, i.e., from senior most managers The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XLII-5, 2018 ISPRS TC V Mid-term Symposium "Geospatial Technology -Pixel to People", 20-23 November 2018, Dehradun, India to actual working level professionals. The gap areas in GST applications and user requirements are compared with the existing and emerging GST/sensors. The research impetus that can be drawn from these gap areas and emerging sensors are also discussed in this paper. The future satellite missions their sensors and capabilities for helping improve WRM is analysed and the respective geospatial products form each future mission/sensor and scope of future capacity building activity has been listed along with these products.
It is discussed with examples, that GST and related techniques can significantly improve the management of water resources at much less cost, higher accuracy and with much larger spatial coverage. Many of the water resources management problems faced today by the water resources managers can be solved by integrating GST in the traditional WRM techniques. This integration can successfully be done by combined effort of subject (WR) experts and expert of GST having basis knowledge of hydrology and water resources, proper formulation and execution of multi-level capacity building programs.