[01] Kuldeep Pareta, DHI (India) Water & Environment Pvt Ltd., New Delhi, India. [02] Shirish Baviskar, Willis Towers Watson, Thane (West) Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.

Water is one of the imperious natural resources that sustain the ecosystem and enable human adaptation to variable climatic changes. The water scarcity in rural and urban areas has affected people as a result of deforestation, large-scale paving of surface, inadequate use, and improper storage facility. The study proposes a methodology to delineate potential zones for water conservation structures using remote sensing and GIS to store and augment the water in Kallar basin and Tamiraparani basin of Tamil Nadu, India. These structures as situated in the upstream can be the solutions providing water to the water scare district, Thoothukudi. Various thematic map layers for slope, rainfall, soil, land use / land cover, drainage network, drainage density, lineament, geology, geomorphology, and lineament density have been prepared using conventional and satellite data. By weighted overlaying these thematic layers in the GIS environment, potential structures were delimited. This study focusses to augment the water use by proposing suitable structures like check dams, percolation tanks, recharge pits, subsurface dikes, and farm ponds. The site suitability for various water conservation structures is determined using the reclassified guidelines derived from consolidated guidelines of Integrated Mission for Sustainable Development (IMSD), Indian National Committee on Hydrology (INCOH), and Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). The accuracy check of the site suitability for all the proposed structure indicated 65-89% correctness.

Water Conservation Structures, Groundwater Augmentation, Kallar Basin, Tamiraparani Basin Remote Sensing, and GIS

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