IRS-1A Applications for Groundwater Targetting

A large population in the world depends on groundwater not only for drinking and domestic use, hut also for agriculture and industry. Search for groundwater, particularly in areas with consolidated and semi-consolidated rock formations, considered more difficult from the point of view of exploration, is considerably aided by the use of hydrogeomorphological maps prepared Using satellite imagery. These maps depict spatial information on various hydrogeomorphological units including structural lineaments having different groundwater prospects. Districtwise hydrogeomorphological maps for the entire country on 1:250,000 scale have been prepared for the National Drinking Water Mission. These maps have been extensively used for locating prospective groundwater sites around problem villages as part of a scientific-source-finding approach involving remote sensing based hydrogeological survey geophysical investigations. This approach has raised success rates to better than 90 per cent in most cases. As examples of hydrogeomorphological mapping, three case studies are cited in this paper.