The two teams are coming together to address and find solutions for water logging in urban areas, especially during the monsoon season. For this, they have launched a project named ‘Water Security Hub’, which was started in the Department of Civil Engineering (IIT Delhi) to develop new approaches to tackle the challenges and barriers to water security and sustainable development in the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi.

Citizens will be able to feed real-time data into the Aab Prahari App. (Source: IIT Delhi)

This project is funded by the UKRI through the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). Now, under this project, a mobile app has been launched. This mobile app will help by reporting the real-time incidence of flooding, in and around their surroundings, by capturing the waterlogging information and uploading it to a central server.

In this app, the information will be fed by locals and then the information fed by the citizens will help the researchers at the Water Security Hub in the effective development and deployment of an early warning system to predict the urban floods through validation of their model.  With the help of this information, the local administration will be able to take any quick action to mitigate the flooding situation.

Additionally, a website named “Jalsuraksha” — jalsuraksha.iitd.ac.in — was also launched on the occasion. It serves as a single platform with all the information related to the research work undertaken by the Water Security Hub team at IIT Delhi to ensure water security in the NCT of Delhi.