Courses, Toolkits, Manuals, Guides and Handbooks

The India Water Portal is pleased to announce to its users, that the Civil Engineering courses from the multi-faceted and multi-modal open courseware of National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) have been put together in the form of a summary. These courses are being carried out by Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore as a collaborative project supported by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (Government of India) to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country, by developing curriculum based video and web courses. In these web based lectures, the authors have developed the subject in detail and in stages in a student-friendly manner.

The training manual by ICRISAT on integrated management of watersheds is meant for watershed development practitioners and provides an account of the socio-technical aspects of watershed. To begin with, the definitional aspects of watershed are spelt out -

• The term “watershed” strictly refers to the divide separating one drainage basin from another. However, over the years, the use of the term watershed to signify a drainage basin or catchment area has come to stay.
• Hydrologically, watershed could be defined as an area from which the runoff drains through a particular point in the drainage system.

 Participatory hydrological monitoring improves the users’ understanding of local groundwater resource characteristics and helps local communities to form a community opinion to support appropriate measures for managing the available resources equitably.

This report by ICRISAT deals with a survey of thirty-two tanks and farm data from Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra states to assess the economic performance of irrigation tanks in semi arid tropics of India. It uses district-wise data on climatic and institutional variables to analyze the factors affecting tank-irrigation density. Results indicate that the spatial distribution of irrigation tanks is determined primarily by physical factors—hard rock substratum, post-monsoon rains, low moisture-holding capacity of soils and by population density.

This report by CAREWATER has been prepared as part of a component on Groundwater Governance in Asia: Theory and Practice under the CGIAR Challenge Programme on Water and Food. The purpose of this collection is to guide a beginner to groundwater hydrology through the basic concepts in this subject. The problems begin with fundamentals of the subject and are followed by those which test the comprehensiveness of understanding. Most problems are illustrated and a real-world situation is related with the problem.