Can drones provide efficient technological solutions for societal benefits In India?
Imagine a drone flowing over the Ganga River sighting dolphins or over agriculture fields to target areas for water harvesting solutions or over mountainous terrain in the Himalayas to identify deforestation in inaccessible areas! These are not fantasies but realities of the modern world if drone technology is allowed to grow in India. There are multiple reasons why drone technology can provide excellent technological solutions: a) time- and resource-saving, b) high precision, and c) accessibility — anytime, anywhere.
India is a country with multitudes of problems but these problems also offer opportunities for designing innovative solutions. This post will attempt to highlight a few examples of the application of drones in different sectors related to natural resource management that can bring huge socio-economic benefits to India. Some of the applications that I have personally worked on include a river rejuvenation project, terrain mapping for a solar power project, forested area mapping for locating mineral deposits, and river surveys to save a turtle sanctuary. I will explore some of these examples to highlight the potential advantage that drones can offer in such applications.
What do drones offer?
Drones can provide high resolution (less than 10 cm) images of the ground as well as topographic undulations of the project area at a very low cost and substantially reduce the number of ground visits required particularly to inaccessible areas. Standard drones such as a quadcopter are good enough to survey small areas, but there are more sophisticated drones available now that can host an array of specific sensors such as a thermal camera for mapping heat losses from buildings or a hyperspectral camera for mapping water pollution. Drone flights may be carried out from a height of ~250–300 meters to provide ortho-images of ~10 cm resolution (Photo 1) although some applications might require even lower heights (< 50 m) such as mapping temperature distribution of an array of solar panels (Photo 2).
Apart from high-resolution photographs and digital images for further processing for extracting specific information, data acquired from drones allow us to generate a high resolution (< 50 cm) digital topography, called digital terrain model (DTM), of the terrain. Further processing of this data allows you to create a virtual fly through the project area (see video 1 and 2) even without visiting the area!
The MGNREGA projects in India: a potential beneficiary of drone technology
The MGNREGA programme of the Government of India provides up to 100 days of work per year to poor people to construct small scale infrastructure. Over 11 years, the programme has built nearly 15 million small scale infrastructure projects across India and adds 5 million every year. The programme targets nearly 50 million of the poorest people in rural India — providing a basic safety net and promoting long term poverty reduction through improved infrastructure, primarily linked with water management and agriculture.
The Frontier Technology Livestreaming (FTL) pilot aims to support the testing of innovative digital technologies for planning and monitoring MGNREGA infrastructure. Apart from improving the efficiency of infrastructure management in MGNREGA, this initiative aims to unlock market opportunities for business in smart technology and climate-related services. FTL has supported an initiative to use the drones to better plan, as well as ascertain the conditions of assets built under the (MGNREGA) during May-October 2018. The project was designed by IIT Kanpur and implemented by Vidrona Ltd, a UK-based, European Space Agency-backed organization. The primary objective of this project was to understand if space-enabled technology could be used to lower the cost, improve the planning and impact, as well as increase the life of the assets built under the MGNREGA scheme in India, and see how climate resilience can be built into rural communities.
The pilot focused on 3 diverse assets in the 3 geographically different states of India and some take-home messages from these projects are as follows:
(a) Farm pond in Chhattisgarh — The pilot focused on assessing the state of one farm pond and ascertaining how it’s impacts could be improved. The study identified the hotspots of accelerated erosion that are detrimental to the life of the pond and also helped in locating the natural inlets and outlets through a high-resolution topographic mapping that was not possible through ground surveys.
2. Bunds in Odisha — The pilot focused on planning land improvement measures in the state. Digital topography helped to identify the subtle breaks in slopes where bunds could be located to guide the water flow and prevent erosion and well use the rainwater more effectively for storage and further use.
3. Ahar-pyne in Bihar — Ahar-pynes are traditional water harvesting structures in south Bihar that have drastically reduced in number due to their ill-maintenance, siltation, and disconnection. This pilot focused on identifying hotspots to restore the connectivity and revival of these traditional water harvesting practices followed by local communities.
Can we see river pollution from drones?
Jermey Wade, the British filmmaker, recently produced a television series called ‘Mighty Rivers’ that highlighted the use of drones for mapping potential pollution plumes in large rivers such as the Ganga. A pilot project by IIT Kanpur featured in this film showing how the intelligent use of space technology can not only help in locating a pollution plume in the Ganga river but also track its source upstream and its influence zone downstream (photo 6) using a multispectral camera. Importantly, such plumes are not easily observable on the ground as our human eyes are not capable of detecting subtle spectral differences in water due to the mixing of pollutants in water. Another drone image from the Assi Ghat in Varanasi shows the pollution plume from a major drain discharging directly into the Ganga river and its downstream spread. Yes, the drones can see everything (if you want them to!).
How does a river choked with sediments look like from the sky?
A recent project was completed by IIT Kanpur for the Water Resources Department, Government of Bihar to assess the excessive river bed sedimentation problem in the Ganga river. Apart from using satellite images, this project made use of drone surveys to identify the major hotspots of siltation in the Ganga river. They documented where the islands within the river channel were as high as 8–10 meters above the channel floor and are not flooded during annual high flows. Some of them now have temporary human settlements on them which makes me wonder how safe the people living there are! If the river were to unchoke itself through a big flood this could wipe out entire communities in a few minutes!
It is fairly well established that sediment management in rivers can be done more effectively by designing basin-scale management strategies. This needs cost-effective and fine scale data capture of target areas that can be facilitated by drones. The developments in drone technology, in terms of availability of different sensors that can be mounted, offer excellent opportunities in water resource management in general and river management in particular.
How can the industries benefit?
There are a number of ways through which a large number of industries could benefit from a wider application of drones — cost-effective, accurate data, remote operation, improved safety of personnel, and a much-improved technical analysis. Apart from the industries involved in mapping and management of natural resources, the utility industry in India and elsewhere are rapidly employing drones for monitoring and inspection of various projects such as infrastructure and construction projects, mineral exploration industries, solar power plants and so on. There are estimates that the application of drones for surveys and inspection can cut down the costs[1] by about 50%. The drone surveys also improve the accuracy considerably due to the range of techniques available now such as LIDAR, thermal cameras and hyperspectral cameras that can be mounted on drones. In addition, the drone surveys also minimize the risks involved in working in inaccessible and dangerous areas and ensures the safety of the personnel involved.
Yes, drones can do a lot of good!
India needs to promote drone technology and its associated industry in a big way as there are huge opportunities waiting to be explored. To facilitate this, we need to continue innovations in drone technology through research and development and also create an enabling environment through simplifying the regulations for drone operations (see previous Medium post) and supporting the drone industry. FTL has been testing the use of drones across the world in various projects. However, there is still a lot of learning to gather before the responsible and widespread use of drones becomes commonplace[3]. Several areas of civilian applications of drones that can be hugely beneficial include wildlife monitoring and protection, forest fire detection and management, rescue operations during natural disasters and so on. Yes, drones can do a lot of good!
[1] https://www.tdworld.com/projects-progress/drones-cut-inspection-costs-half-improve-distribution-reliability
[2] https://medium.com/frontier-technology-livestreaming/the-uav-air-bridge-goes-to-africa-a4d35b607bd8
[3] https://medium.com/frontier-technology-livestreaming/running-a-drone-pilot-reflections-1d6ff2c04e40
