Clean Ganga Mission to utilise geospatial and crowd-sourcing technologies for pollution monitoring of Ganga

To effectively plan and monitor the Indian government flagship Clean Ganga Mission, National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG), ministry of water resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation and National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) today signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indian Space Research Organisation in New Delhi.

The objective of the MoU is to utilise geospatial and crowd-sourcing technologies for pollution monitoring in the Ganga.

Union minister of water resources, river development and Ganga rejuvenation, Uma Bharti, explained ISRO's role in the Clean Ganga Mission and also launched Bhuvan Ganga mobile application and web portal, an exclusive web portal deployed at ISRO Bhuvan's geoportal department, with all geospatial layers related to the Ganga.

It will be used as a tool to support decision making and planning for the Clean Ganga Mission. The Bhuvan mobile app is a user-friendly Adroid based application to enable the public to collect and report information on various pollution sources that affects the water quality of the Ganga.

This mobile app will provide a platform for crowd sourcing to monitor pollution in river Ganga and enable decision makers to prioritize interventions. The first version of the application is available for download on the Bhuvan Ganga web portal (http://bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in/ganga).

NMCG has identified the need to utilise space and other technologies for effective planning and monitoring the activities taken up for Clean Ganga Mission.

NMCG and NRSC are utilising space technology in the Clean Ganga Mission and will work together in the areas of applying geospatial technology in the various aspects of Clean Ganga initiative.

The areas of mutual interest betwen the two roganisations that have been identified include use of geospatial technology for water quality monitoring, development of mobile application for enabling community participation in monitoring, up-linking of field data, customising Bhuvan geoportal for visualising, query and analysis of datasets related to Ganga basin and co-ordinate and initiate necessary linkages with other agencies, with regard to geo-spatial database and web-based applications for river water quality monitoring.