Rural employment creation is the vital process in mitigating economic weakness of rural poor using best of the technological paradigm available. Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is a citizen benefit scheme with legal binding that ensures guaranteed demand driven wage employment to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work, within 15 days of making such a requisition. Under this scheme around 30 lakh (three million) assets are created annually across the country, which involves construction of water harvesting, drought relief and flood control structures as preferred activities, besides others. GeoMGNREGA is the geospatial component used under MGNREGA, for space technology based innovation in locating the assets created on a satellite image database, followed by quality control of information, with subsequent enabling of citizen feedback on the assets created towards transparency in implementation of the scheme.

Conventionally, progress monitoring of irrigation infrastructure creation is carried out through field inspection of few selected locations and also using inputs provided by implementing state agencies. Based on the potential of high resolution remote sensing data for irrigation infrastructure monitoring as demonstrated by National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Central Water Commission (CWC) entrusted it to use Cartosat satellite data for assessing the irrigation infrastructure creation status in 103 projects under the Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme (AIBP), spread over 21 states, covering 6.45 million hectare (Mha) irrigation potential. Further, Bhuvan-AIBP web application, simplifying the satellite data usage for monitoring irrigation infrastructure creation status was also developed. The capacity building enabled CWC to subsequently carry out the monitoring of irrigation projects, internally, using the AIBP-Bhuvan online monitoring tool.

A dedicated geoportal Telangana Water Resources Information System (TWRIS)for Irrigation and Command Area Development (I&CAD) Department, Government of Telangana, is developed on Bhuvan, for organising the necessary geospatial information for water resources management of the state, using multi-source inputs. The portal also provides online tools and support for geospatial data creation, visualisation and integration of water resources data from different sources.

In order to provide satellite derived input for efficient forest fire management in India, comprehensive forest fire detection and monitoring system is developed by National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), ISRO. Intra- and inter-seasonal spatio-temporal pattern of forest fires are monitored and analysed to derive regional and national level statistics for active fire locations, extent of area burnt and prioritisation of fire vulnerable zones. The active fire products and burnt area products are provided to user (state forest departments) and Forest Survey of India (FSI) for fire mitigation and management.

India is the second worst flood affected country in the world and the perennial river basins of Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mahanadi and Godavari rivers witness flooding every year. Flood forecasting, near real-time monitoring of floods and flood hazard zonation are the widely adopted methods of flood hazard mitigation.