MahaMADAT (Drought Assessment in Maharashtra)

Maharashtra have been traditionally susceptible to droughts owing to its extreme dependence of agricultural operations on the monsoon rainfall and poor bequest of surface and groundwater resources.  Maharashtra Government have devoted sizable resources in strengthening resilience to droughts through creation of irrigation potential, soil and water conservation, watershed management, development of stress tolerant crop varieties, improved agronomic practices, etc. All these efforts undoubtedly blunted the edge of droughts to a larger extent, yet the distress and disruption in the livelihood of vulnerable sections of rural society, is at stake.

            Drought, being a recurrent phenomenon in Maharashtra, has its destructive effects through sharp decline in agricultural production and farm incomes, eventually, culminated into shrinkage in opportunities for rural employment causing widespread migration among farmers, farm labors, rural artisans and small rural businesses. 

            To a larger extent technological advances have substantiated the need for sole dependence on crop productivity assessment based on annewari/paisewari or crop cutting assessments in the determination of drought. Now, it is possible to arrive at an objective, timely and accurate assessment of drought through the establishment of an elaborate scientific drought monitoring methodology.

            The early warning and assessment of agricultural drought requires handling a wide range of data, generally from different sources, sharing a common spatial and / or non-spatial component that making it possible to analyze and represent it in the form of maps and statistics. Development of a dedicated Geo-Portal system for drought assessment would streamline the implementation of the drought declaration activities.

            In this context MRSAC developed Geo-Portal based on the guidelines provided in Manual for Drought Management 2016, brought out by Ministry of Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers' Welfare, Govt. of India, and further summarized and enacted by Maharashtra Government vide G.R. 2017/173/2017/M-7 dated October 7, 2017for the State.

            Geo-Portal is one part of the information systems which can help in disseminating spatial and non-spatial information. Geo-Portal is a specially designed website that integrates information from diverse sources like email, SMS, mobile, search engine, etc. together in a uniform way to be served as a single point of access for information.  The GIS web Geo-Portal functions as a web-based gateway to integrate these distributed geographic resources.