GUWAHATI: ‘Jal Tarangini’, an innovative automated river water level monitoring system jointly developed by District Informatics Officer of NIC, Hailakandi District Unit Monsoor Akhtar Barbhuiya and District Informatics Officer of NIC, Chirang District Unit, Surajit Phukan bagged the coveted Gold Award under the category of ‘Emerging Technologies’ at the National Informatics Center (NIC) Innovation Challenge 2018.
The award was officially handed over by Union Minister of Electronics & Information Technology, Law & Justice, Ravi Shankar Prasad in the presence of Neeta Verma, Director General, NIC and other senior officials during the National Level District Informatics Officers’ Meet on Grassroots Informatics organized by NIC in New Delhi recently.
“Flood is one of the most recurring natural disasters continuously faced by States like Assam. More importantly, the management of flood is a major challenge for the administration year after year in terms of precautionary and preventive measures. However, owing to the over dependence on traditional and rudimentary methodologies in monitoring the rising water levels in the rivers, the flood management at real time has so far been a major challenge. Hence, we felt the need for developing a well-designed mechanism for streamlining the task,” said Barbhuiya adding, “To meet such needs for a prompt decision making, it is necessary to introduce new technologies, which should be fast, accurate, minimizing human dependency and at the same time, cost effective.”
With painstaking efforts the duo set out to develop the new concept “JalTarangini” based on Internet of Things (IoT) technology. “The new automated river water level monitoring system has the ability to capture, transmit and present real time accurate water-level report to the decision makers in the administration as well as the citizens automatically without any human intervention,” said Barbhuiya.
Explaining the intricacies of the new mechanism, Barbhuiya said, the live data transmitted by the device installed at various identified locations on the river will be made available to the user in the form of mobile app and web-based system. These timely inputs will assist the administration in making quick risk assessment and take prompt decisions. Similarly, the public interface of the system will disseminate necessary and prompt alerts amongst the citizens acting as early warning system.”
Meanwhile the new system developed by Barbhuiya and Phukan has earned laurels for them in different circles. Deputy Commissioner, Hailakandi, Krishna Govinda Bhuyan while congratulating Barbhuiya and his colleague for the new innovation, exuded the optimism that the IoT technology will help a flood prone state like Assam to meet any exigency during floods through early warning system and effectively minimize the loss of precious lives.