Ministry of Water Resources faced challenges in collecting data from all the
states in India, in order to plan minor irrigation (MI) schemes for the states.
The manual census process for data collection was cumbersome, and took eight to
nine years to complete.

At the end of the process, reports were generated to take the planning
process for each state forward.

The Water Resources Informatics Division came up with the solution of
computerizing the census process. With the computerization of this process,
reports can be generated within three months. These reports are then submitted
to the Planning Commission to plan future irrigation schemes in areas where they
are badly needed. Not only this, the ministry can now access an exact count of
all the minor irrigation schemes running in the country. In this process, the
databases collected from all the states and union territories will be merged to
make a national-level database and a large number of reports will be generated.
The Ministry of Water Resources will use this data for publishing a
national-level MIS report.

Project Specs Business problem: Finalizing the huge data structure for extracting 100 percent accurate data, Plus people on this new system was another challenge IT solution: Computerizing the entire minor irrigation census Impact: Planners don’t have to wait for years for reports to plan irrigation schemes in all the states of India; improved and expedited process of deployment and restoration of minor irrigation needs in all states Implementation partner : NIC

Dr Kishore Kumar, Technical Dir, NIC

The entire project is developed on VB6 with SQL Server in the backend. For
data entry, a standalone interface is provided in all the states and data is
stored on MS Access or SQL Server depending on the hardware/software provided by
the states. Then, the validated entered data is sent to the main center, where
it is transferred to a single database and reports are generated. They have also
published this data online, where it can be used for other research purposes.
The project also has BI (business Intelligent) functionality to generate reports
from the Ministry level to the individual, whoever is associated with minor
irrigation schemes. The IS software comprises Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0,
Microsoft VB.NET, Seagate Crystal Repot, SQL Server 2000, and MS Access 2000.
The hardware for this consists of a PIII Xeon server with 768 MB RAM running
Windows 2000 Server and two P4 Win 98 clients with 128 MB RAM each. For Business
Intelligence, the software comprises Cognos, ArcInfo, and SQL Server 2000. The
hardware consists of a PIII Xeon server with 768 MB RAM running Windows 2000
Server and two P4 Win 98 clients with 128 MB RAM each.