Use of geospatial technologies for village level vulnerability assessment of water scarcity in himachal pradesh

Nearly 70 percent of the population of India lives in rural areas. The requirement of basic natural resources like drinking water, sanitation, technology, agriculture, education etc. in these areas poses a challenge to the policy makers to plan, implement and monitor various developmental schemes. There is a constant change in the landuse of topography of Himachal Pradesh. The constant development and growth combined with variable climatic conditions over the years cause more stress on natural resources specially water resources. This paper examines vulnerability assessment of water scarcity between domestic, livestock and agriculture water use with geospatial parameters at the household level in rural villages of Himachal Pradesh. Rainfall data for five years was analyzed for the study area along with household interviews, self-reporting by households and statistical mapping. The village wise available water requirement for two cropping seasons Kharif and Rabi was estimated for different crops and livestock water use requirement using the GIS and Remote sensing. Runoff available for each village based on average annual rainfall was calculated. Results show that spatial variation of water use for domestic, livestock, and agriculture use remained high for the year 2012 as there was evidently less amount of rainfall. The vulnerability maps were generated for the years 2012 and 2016 which depicted the areas which were vulnerable to the water scarcity compared to the other regions in the cluster. The villages having dominant landuse as tea gardens depicted less variation over the period, due to the minimal landuse change. This study confirms the appropriateness of the geospatial technologies alongwith direct observation, survey, and micro-geographical methods for quantitative water use studies at village level.